More Chekhov, more on books

This paragraph from a Chekhov short story describes something of how I read. The first and last sentences sound particularly familiar. Are these the last years of my confinement? What am I confined in? Life and consciousness and failure. Could books save me? (With the passage's final image, I was reminded of Ishmael clinging to Queequeg's coffin.) Ultimately, they destroy the prisoner in the story. Books, and his years of solitude, turn him into a cynic, a misanthrope, a Timon. Is Chekhov saying that if you knew humanity only through its books, you would want to avoid it in real life? Is he saying that that conclusion would be accurate? And if so, is he blaming humanity for this outcome, or just writers of books, like himself?

During the last years of his confinement the prisoner read an extraordinary amount, quite haphazard. Now he would apply himself to the natural sciences, then he would read Byron or Shakespeare. Notes used to come from him in which he asked to be sent at the same time a book on chemistry, a textbook of medicine, a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology. He read as though he were swimming in the sea among broken pieces of wreckage, and in his desire to save his life was eagerly grasping one piece after another.

                                                                                                         
                                                                                                           -Anton Chekhov
                                                                                                            "The Bet"

Books: the way of the horse

It wouldn't be a terrible fate; everybody loves horses. But I think someday print books will have gone the way of horses, once not too too long ago so essential in so many ways, now a curiosity, a luxury, a pleasure to see but few of us ever really get near them or need them. Someday there will be people among us who own books (horses), who read books (ride horses) regularly. And, like horse people today, book people will be seen as sort of interesting for that slightly exotic bit of culture they experience with their books (horses) and all their book-(horse)-friends. Some of us will envy them their special interest and the activity of reading (riding) and caring for their books (horses) and that extra bit of knowledge they have about types (breeds) of books (horses) and how to handle a book (horse). Having grown up around books (horses), many of their children will have learned to love books (horses) and will come to have their own. Nearly everyone will at some time in his or her life have read a book (ridden a horse), on vacation at a fancy resort or while visiting a family friend who keeps a few. Some will find they enjoy being around books (horses) and reading books (riding horses) but will never come to own one. Perhaps they will be prohibitively expensive to own. Perhaps some will find they are allergic to books (horses), or frightened of them. I think I will be dead by the time this happens, but perhaps not for long.