The answer from at least this pro-trained literary critic: the representation of reality becomes a reality that is itself both interesting and useful insofar as it will reward your return to ("actual") reality.
To put it another way: prose is always always glass because it is a representation. "Tree" is not the same as the tall leafy thing outside your window. That said, the glass can be clear(er) or stained. You look *through* one, *at* the other. What you see in the stained glass (and the glimpse of the tree behind it, now all beautifully pink and yellow) is the point of the stained glass. The word "tree", of course, being the clear glass.
Not all novelists are stained-glass novelists. Doestoevsky wants you to look out the window at his rather ungainly pet ideas (and he'll drag you, not beckon you, to that window). But writers like Gass, Joyce, and Updike at his best create a new world out of language, one that illuminates, even *recreates*, the world we return to when we put down the book. Others, like Salter, look like clear glass but are subtly, beautifully, deeply stained.
And this is really what advanced literary study is for: to enable you to be able to see this. Whether that's worth anything is hard to say. I think it is, but I would, wouldn't I?
Interesting that this analysis ignores the traditional/canonical purpose of education, which is the cultivation of the soul. Novels are interesting in that they began as a very low status form of written entertainment, but nonetheless now the classics and (too a lesser degree) contemporary literary fiction are considered to have an improving and deepening effect on the human psyche.
My theory would be something like "People like stories. For a myriad of reasons, we've grown to like stories (we've been telling them around campfires for millennia, they mimic experiences and memories, and we learn from them). That's why humans love stories in their different presentations (movies, jokes, music, opera, theater, tv series, ig reels, novels, fables, and so on). From the best stories, we can extract lessons, knowledge, ideas, inspirations, and food for thought. I think you may choose the story modality of your preference. Novels have their advantages (analogical, slow, purity of view, no boundaries, allow for deep metaphors, and so on). Read them. However, other story modalities have their advantages, consume them."
Something I and a friend were discussing just a few weeks back. I don;t remember where we landed, but this piece definitely explores a bunch more than we did.
I feel it’s closer to point 3 - as in Books are to Movies (or even Music) as paintings are to Photographs.
Photographs are too precise. Information density is far higher. And they leave little to imagination. Thus, offering lesser control over interpretation for the viewers and lesser scope for mental engagement.
Same with Movies or video content.
Books - like paintings - are sparser on info density. But richer in conceptual density. Leaves room for imagination. And it's not just the nature of the content but the pacing itself allows for gaps in which the mind lingers on the concepts and ideas. And the inner thoughts of characters in the novels - like you say.
To expand on theory 4, I think that great authors are usually great at understanding people. And they find a way to transmit that understanding to the page. So if you're curious about the world around you and the people in it, novels are a great way to understand those people (who are often very different from you) because you get to peak inside their brains/thoughts. I agree with your final point that there's nothing better than a great conversation, but if you are curious about people, a novel might be the next best thing.
V good piece. I think points 5, 7 and 8 most resonated with me. The ‘purity of vision’ particularly. A novel (or really any book, at least pre-AI) is basically a reflection of one person’s mind over the months/years it took to write, undiluted by committee. So reading means you get to spend time with something that cost someone else an unreasonable amount of their personal time and attention to make. It’s hard to replicate that in any other medium.
Stories contain wisdom. We need wisdom. Novels make us work to understand the wisdom. The work of imagining the story makes us value the wisdom more. The wisdom is deep inside the story, it is multi layered, and its relevance to our life usually is not obvious. We may only understand the wisdom on a deep subconscious level, although we may also understand intellectually if we try. The wisdom feeds our subconscious. Our subconscious is hard for us to understand, because it is not directly available to us, but it affects our mood more than our rational intellect. That is why we struggle to explain why we find novels so deeply satisfying.
Going even further than short form videos, I think reading is much better than watching TV or movies because I consider reading to be actively training your mind, while watching is passive. For example - when you read a novel, or a fantasy, or sci-fi, you have to actively create the image in your head that the author describes. Meanwhile, the directors and cinematographers create the world for you and you passively consume that.
As a frequent reader, I will take the liberty to suggest some more structure to your theories.
--
question: should you read novels?
answer 1: yes, because getting the ability of reading a novel is worth it (theory 2)
answer 2: yes, because its a common cultural language (theory 3)
answer 3: yes, because soul feel good when read book
question: but why soul feel good when read book?
answer 0: shut up it just does (theory 6)
answer 1: because reading has a learned association with high status and high status feels good. (theory 1)
answer 2: because novels are the closest thing we have to experiencing someone else's inner monologue (theory 4 & 5)
answer 3: because it makes your brain feel more flow-y than brainrot-y. (theory 7)
question: but why not do activity X, which is better than reading novels?
answer: you cannot always do X so you might as well read a novel then (theory 8)
--
This was a very fun post, thanks for writing it. Don't take this restructure as some harsh critique, I think you listed just about every mechanism that directionally supports "book good".
Here's why I read novels: they're fun and mentally stimulating. That's it.
It's strange to see the activity described as an attempt to, "[train] yourself to calmly pursue long-term goals". That's not how novel reading is supposed to go. You're supposed to be immersed, with your eyes glued to the text, until the sun dims and your neck hurts.
To be blunt, I see the theories as an indication you lack the privilege of intrinsic immersion that a typical bookworm achieves.
I think it's status. If I am on my phone, I'm still reading. Blog posts, tweet threads, news articles, journal papers, The Atlantic. With a few exceptions, those are not seen as high quality literature regardless of what I learn. Reading a novel feels better.
I think there's another explanation that you didn't mention. I think it sounds a bit silly but on introspection I think it's descriptive. Reading on well-lit electronic screens causes a predictable sort of eyestrain than reading books. If I am used to the former, the latter can feel nice. I suppose this has more to do with the physical medium of books but if most of the books I read in paper are novels, it amounts to roughly the same thing. (there are advantages to both mediums - I cannot read books in an Uber, for example)
I don't find this unclear at all. I mean, what is a book? It's really just a long piece of writing.
It goes without saying that it won't fry your attention span, making better than most things under 5 minutes long.
Obviously, reading smutty romantasy is not a particularly commendable use of time, and should best be compared to trashy tv or even just outright porn. Thus books aren't intrinsically "good", either.
So we're left with TV and movies. I would argue excellent instances of those are absolutely on par with, and as worth engaging with, as excellent books, but there's far fewer of them on account of how much they cost to make.
So books are just the medium with the largest absolute amount of high quality stuff -- seems reasonable to me. If someone made a 200 page long blog post with a similar deliberateness as any "good novel", I would be telling everyone and their mother to read it.
There's other medium-unique features but that's a secondary consideration imo.
>Some movies have voice-overs where characters explain what they’re thinking. But this is generally considered cringe and a poor use of the medium. Meanwhile, many books are mostly about exploring what the characters are thinking.
The banquet scene in Dune (the book) was all about this, and was one of my favorite parts. No wonder that scene got cut from the movie. (The movie was still great, and I understand why they didn't include that scene).
I just finished reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. He argued (roughly) that the written word is a medium of thought, and television is a medium of entertainment. Even educational and informative television reshapes itself toward entertainment. (Natural extension of his argument: short-form video is just super-television.)
The written word can also be compared to oral tradition (rhetorical excellence is important, truth is contained in aphorisms and memorable anecdotes). It allows for the intentional construction of thought. Things are written, revised, referenced. If good enough, they survive for millennia.
To be more specific to the novel, it is the best technology for experiencing a sustained state of consciousness given by another person. Both oral storytelling and television require too much sustained attention -- the need to entertain -- to do that. Your mind can steep in the perspective and understanding of the characters and the world. Maybe you just didn't like C&P and truly don't remember much of it, but I'd bet you remember how Raskolnikov's perspective feels more than what actually happened or was said.
A really brilliant conversation might be a preferable way to spend an hour, but I don't think it ever does what a novel does, and as you say, I have far, far better access to good novels than good conversations.
Reading novels is a good way of improving your language skills. This is directly useful since language is so central to modern life, and also plausibly gives more general cognitive gains given how complex and central to our brains language is.
Why novels in particular? Well, they're clearly much better for this than video, even video with lots of complex dialogue which most don't have. And compared to other forms of reading, novels:
* Describe situations and ideas that are, well, novel, and hence less predictable, so you have to work harder to understand them. As a result they're also more likely to use vocabulary that doesn't come up in your everyday life very often.
* Are fairly long, so require you to keep more context in your head and infer things that aren't explicitly stated.
* Have more thought put into their use of language as an artistic and expressive medium rather than a pragmatic tool for conveying ideas.
*Are fun to read. If you optimised purely for improving language skills the result would probably be quite mentally taxing to read, so you wouldn't do it as much, meaning the gains in practice are lower than novels.
The answer from at least this pro-trained literary critic: the representation of reality becomes a reality that is itself both interesting and useful insofar as it will reward your return to ("actual") reality.
To put it another way: prose is always always glass because it is a representation. "Tree" is not the same as the tall leafy thing outside your window. That said, the glass can be clear(er) or stained. You look *through* one, *at* the other. What you see in the stained glass (and the glimpse of the tree behind it, now all beautifully pink and yellow) is the point of the stained glass. The word "tree", of course, being the clear glass.
Not all novelists are stained-glass novelists. Doestoevsky wants you to look out the window at his rather ungainly pet ideas (and he'll drag you, not beckon you, to that window). But writers like Gass, Joyce, and Updike at his best create a new world out of language, one that illuminates, even *recreates*, the world we return to when we put down the book. Others, like Salter, look like clear glass but are subtly, beautifully, deeply stained.
And this is really what advanced literary study is for: to enable you to be able to see this. Whether that's worth anything is hard to say. I think it is, but I would, wouldn't I?
Interesting that this analysis ignores the traditional/canonical purpose of education, which is the cultivation of the soul. Novels are interesting in that they began as a very low status form of written entertainment, but nonetheless now the classics and (too a lesser degree) contemporary literary fiction are considered to have an improving and deepening effect on the human psyche.
My theory would be something like "People like stories. For a myriad of reasons, we've grown to like stories (we've been telling them around campfires for millennia, they mimic experiences and memories, and we learn from them). That's why humans love stories in their different presentations (movies, jokes, music, opera, theater, tv series, ig reels, novels, fables, and so on). From the best stories, we can extract lessons, knowledge, ideas, inspirations, and food for thought. I think you may choose the story modality of your preference. Novels have their advantages (analogical, slow, purity of view, no boundaries, allow for deep metaphors, and so on). Read them. However, other story modalities have their advantages, consume them."
Something I and a friend were discussing just a few weeks back. I don;t remember where we landed, but this piece definitely explores a bunch more than we did.
I feel it’s closer to point 3 - as in Books are to Movies (or even Music) as paintings are to Photographs.
Photographs are too precise. Information density is far higher. And they leave little to imagination. Thus, offering lesser control over interpretation for the viewers and lesser scope for mental engagement.
Same with Movies or video content.
Books - like paintings - are sparser on info density. But richer in conceptual density. Leaves room for imagination. And it's not just the nature of the content but the pacing itself allows for gaps in which the mind lingers on the concepts and ideas. And the inner thoughts of characters in the novels - like you say.
To expand on theory 4, I think that great authors are usually great at understanding people. And they find a way to transmit that understanding to the page. So if you're curious about the world around you and the people in it, novels are a great way to understand those people (who are often very different from you) because you get to peak inside their brains/thoughts. I agree with your final point that there's nothing better than a great conversation, but if you are curious about people, a novel might be the next best thing.
V good piece. I think points 5, 7 and 8 most resonated with me. The ‘purity of vision’ particularly. A novel (or really any book, at least pre-AI) is basically a reflection of one person’s mind over the months/years it took to write, undiluted by committee. So reading means you get to spend time with something that cost someone else an unreasonable amount of their personal time and attention to make. It’s hard to replicate that in any other medium.
Stories contain wisdom. We need wisdom. Novels make us work to understand the wisdom. The work of imagining the story makes us value the wisdom more. The wisdom is deep inside the story, it is multi layered, and its relevance to our life usually is not obvious. We may only understand the wisdom on a deep subconscious level, although we may also understand intellectually if we try. The wisdom feeds our subconscious. Our subconscious is hard for us to understand, because it is not directly available to us, but it affects our mood more than our rational intellect. That is why we struggle to explain why we find novels so deeply satisfying.
Going even further than short form videos, I think reading is much better than watching TV or movies because I consider reading to be actively training your mind, while watching is passive. For example - when you read a novel, or a fantasy, or sci-fi, you have to actively create the image in your head that the author describes. Meanwhile, the directors and cinematographers create the world for you and you passively consume that.
Hi mr dynomight,
As a frequent reader, I will take the liberty to suggest some more structure to your theories.
--
question: should you read novels?
answer 1: yes, because getting the ability of reading a novel is worth it (theory 2)
answer 2: yes, because its a common cultural language (theory 3)
answer 3: yes, because soul feel good when read book
question: but why soul feel good when read book?
answer 0: shut up it just does (theory 6)
answer 1: because reading has a learned association with high status and high status feels good. (theory 1)
answer 2: because novels are the closest thing we have to experiencing someone else's inner monologue (theory 4 & 5)
answer 3: because it makes your brain feel more flow-y than brainrot-y. (theory 7)
question: but why not do activity X, which is better than reading novels?
answer: you cannot always do X so you might as well read a novel then (theory 8)
--
This was a very fun post, thanks for writing it. Don't take this restructure as some harsh critique, I think you listed just about every mechanism that directionally supports "book good".
i think novels reveal more of the writer's brain than non fiction
The theories are all really weird to me.
Here's why I read novels: they're fun and mentally stimulating. That's it.
It's strange to see the activity described as an attempt to, "[train] yourself to calmly pursue long-term goals". That's not how novel reading is supposed to go. You're supposed to be immersed, with your eyes glued to the text, until the sun dims and your neck hurts.
To be blunt, I see the theories as an indication you lack the privilege of intrinsic immersion that a typical bookworm achieves.
I think it's status. If I am on my phone, I'm still reading. Blog posts, tweet threads, news articles, journal papers, The Atlantic. With a few exceptions, those are not seen as high quality literature regardless of what I learn. Reading a novel feels better.
I think there's another explanation that you didn't mention. I think it sounds a bit silly but on introspection I think it's descriptive. Reading on well-lit electronic screens causes a predictable sort of eyestrain than reading books. If I am used to the former, the latter can feel nice. I suppose this has more to do with the physical medium of books but if most of the books I read in paper are novels, it amounts to roughly the same thing. (there are advantages to both mediums - I cannot read books in an Uber, for example)
I don't find this unclear at all. I mean, what is a book? It's really just a long piece of writing.
It goes without saying that it won't fry your attention span, making better than most things under 5 minutes long.
Obviously, reading smutty romantasy is not a particularly commendable use of time, and should best be compared to trashy tv or even just outright porn. Thus books aren't intrinsically "good", either.
So we're left with TV and movies. I would argue excellent instances of those are absolutely on par with, and as worth engaging with, as excellent books, but there's far fewer of them on account of how much they cost to make.
So books are just the medium with the largest absolute amount of high quality stuff -- seems reasonable to me. If someone made a 200 page long blog post with a similar deliberateness as any "good novel", I would be telling everyone and their mother to read it.
There's other medium-unique features but that's a secondary consideration imo.
>Some movies have voice-overs where characters explain what they’re thinking. But this is generally considered cringe and a poor use of the medium. Meanwhile, many books are mostly about exploring what the characters are thinking.
The banquet scene in Dune (the book) was all about this, and was one of my favorite parts. No wonder that scene got cut from the movie. (The movie was still great, and I understand why they didn't include that scene).
I just finished reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. He argued (roughly) that the written word is a medium of thought, and television is a medium of entertainment. Even educational and informative television reshapes itself toward entertainment. (Natural extension of his argument: short-form video is just super-television.)
The written word can also be compared to oral tradition (rhetorical excellence is important, truth is contained in aphorisms and memorable anecdotes). It allows for the intentional construction of thought. Things are written, revised, referenced. If good enough, they survive for millennia.
To be more specific to the novel, it is the best technology for experiencing a sustained state of consciousness given by another person. Both oral storytelling and television require too much sustained attention -- the need to entertain -- to do that. Your mind can steep in the perspective and understanding of the characters and the world. Maybe you just didn't like C&P and truly don't remember much of it, but I'd bet you remember how Raskolnikov's perspective feels more than what actually happened or was said.
A really brilliant conversation might be a preferable way to spend an hour, but I don't think it ever does what a novel does, and as you say, I have far, far better access to good novels than good conversations.
The first answer that occurs to me:
Reading novels is a good way of improving your language skills. This is directly useful since language is so central to modern life, and also plausibly gives more general cognitive gains given how complex and central to our brains language is.
Why novels in particular? Well, they're clearly much better for this than video, even video with lots of complex dialogue which most don't have. And compared to other forms of reading, novels:
* Describe situations and ideas that are, well, novel, and hence less predictable, so you have to work harder to understand them. As a result they're also more likely to use vocabulary that doesn't come up in your everyday life very often.
* Are fairly long, so require you to keep more context in your head and infer things that aren't explicitly stated.
* Have more thought put into their use of language as an artistic and expressive medium rather than a pragmatic tool for conveying ideas.
*Are fun to read. If you optimised purely for improving language skills the result would probably be quite mentally taxing to read, so you wouldn't do it as much, meaning the gains in practice are lower than novels.