Books rarely teach a subject to a person. It's more about shaping the concept in their mind. Let's take a book that shaped how I think about the media: "The Po

Books rarely teach a subject to a person. It's more about shaping the concept in their mind. Let's take a book that shaped how I think about the media: "The Powers that Be" by David Halberstam. It's a tome of a book, clocking in at over 700 pages. It is a history and analysis of American media in the 20th century. I cannot recite many anecdotes or facts from it - although it's entirely possible, maybe even likely, that facts and anecdotes related to the media I know are from that book, I just have forgotten that. But it shaped how I think about the media, its various mediums, the power it has, and in particular, its influence on, and relationship with, politics. This "shaping" thing is both nebulous but critical to how we think and understand the world. Let's take yet another example: the astrophysics courses I took in undergrad. Two semester's worth: one semester on stars, and one semester on everything else in the universe. (Quoth my professor: "And that's reflective of our understanding.") I used to be able to narrate all of the steps of a main sequence star. I no longer can. I can get close, and I can throw out phrases like "hydrostatic equilibrium", but I have forgotten so much from those courses. It's a year of learning! But that is not a waste. My understanding of our solar system, galaxy and universe were shaped by this course, so that I at least can have an intuitive understanding of what we know. This influences how I think about these things, and it influences how I interact with new information about these things.