One of my more annoying personal characteristics is a seeming aversion to instruction manuals. For someone to whom reading is one of the four or five great pleasures of life, for whatever reason, I cannot abide the tedium of reading a set of instructions. For one thing, nothing seems to stick until I actually try to perform the functions laid out. I might as well be reading Linear-B. (Oddly, I can read theoretical texts without much difficulty—physics, art, philosophy, psychology, and so forth—it’s only step by step “how to” works that both try my patience and do me no apparent good.) …