I think theories need to split between roughly two types of reading: reading for entertainment vs reading for art or aesthetic experience. Obviously these blur into one another within the same book, etc. But I think reading for entertainment is pretty much like doing anything else for entertainment (Theory 7 with a dash of Theory 1). Reading for aesthetic experience, though, is more like going to an art gallery or hiking up a mountain. For me, that is a kind of experience that is (a) about the time spent doing it, during which one is reminded of time passing (what the Greeks called aisthesis) rather than passing the time (being absorbed in entertainment); (b) about constantly second-guessing & monitoring how the author did it, admiring the craft, especially the formal aspects (i.e. the writing itself, not what it is about).
Sidenote: among professional novel readers (literature professors) I find they rarely talk about their personal reading & neither do I actually. Which makes me doubt the status thing for literary types (although they are obsessed with status more broadly). Also, a standard theory in book history is that the novel in particular is a private form, unlike almost all other popular entertainment up to the 18th C. when it became popular. So the idea is it's the least status- or social-based medium. And then it's either about escapism or living a kind of emotional or personal life you couldn't through irl means. As Harrold Bloom said, "In this life, we can't know enough people [without reading novels]". I don't necessarily agree with this stuff but it's a common view literary studies.
Curious, why don't you agree with Harold Bloom's view? It seems to me that novels are the only way to access other human experiences. I guess memoirs are another way--but I don't particularly trust the writing here --they feel more like performative narratives
1) You're definitely underestimating how prolific authors can be; long series and trope-y genres can support rapid writing. Glynn Stewart, for an example I follow (I enjoy the Starship's Mage and Aether Spheres series, but he definitely has go-to plot and character beats; reading most of his series definitely got annoyingly samey and was probably a mistake): not counting novellas, published 4 books in 2025 and 6 in 2024. (I'm not sure how you'd count webserial authors: a lot of the serials I follow do 2-3 chapters a week, but chapter sizes vary and I'm not sure how much editing would add time or remove words.)
2) A theory-5-adjacent reason I like novels for speculative fiction: prose has lower price pressure on worldbuilding and narrative choices vs other media. Live action is especially price shifted: a film-maker's modern environment is cheap to film, anything else has a significant budget for location, sets, props, effects, etc. Comics get close; they require authors more strongly decide how things look, and don't idiomatically have enough words to rigidly define worldbuilding (and, for a more pure theory 5 reason, are more expensive in general), but drawing fantastic worlds isn't much harder than describing them. Animation is like comics, except movement is expensive (and it's generally way more expensive).
3) A minor theory-7-related hot take: decent video games aren't really much worse than novels as a way to spend time. Novels can get much better, and bad games can get skinner-box-like, but video games are at least as much a thing you do, just in different (possibly complimentary) ways. (Otherwise: games are worse for pure status reasons; cultivate different, but possibly also good, skills; are at least pretty good for shared context; and are bad at legible mind-space (but maybe better at exploring the potential tools in weird indie stuff than other media?). Purity of vision is weird: major releases are much worse, but my (poorly-informed) impression is that the weird indie space is comparable.)
- You're not looking at a screen when reading a novel (even if you're reading an e-book, the screen might not be backlit).
- You're more likely to pause when reading a book. When I read, I often backtrack, linger on a few sentences, or look away from the book for minutes at a time.
- Your mind switches context a lot more when watching short-form content. Even movies and TV often switch between A, B, and C plots every few minutes.
- Related: Books are less hectic and fast-paced than movies and TV. I think this is the biggest factor. A slow, calm book will make me feel at peace, as will a slow, calm movie or TV show (e.g. Studio Ghibli movies). A fast-paced web serial like Chili and the Chocolate Factory will do the opposite.
I specifically started reading novels to combat phone addiction, and it works (at least, for me). That fact that one can be an antidote to the other is revealing-- even if not perfectly understood. Even if you're not able to engage with a book club, you're in a constant dialogue with yourself as you read, and that's also a type of a social outlet. Now, novels compared to movies is different. Both help me access another type of human experience and allow it to shape my character as well. I read A Separate Peace in high school, and it still haunts me. So do scenes from the movie Mystic River. But my success rate of having another character's experience embedded into me is higher with novels. I think it's because novels allow a reader's imagination to more slowly (and therefore more permanently) embed the experience. With reading, you can just sit there and stew on a paragraph for a half-hour--but can't with a movie scene
Unrelated points - IME the true value of Dostoevsky is pointing you to the "American Dostoevsky", "Dostoevsky of Texas", "Dime Store Dostoevsky" - all of whom are much more readable than the regular Dostoevsky. 95% of the grand thematic content, 200% more readable. If someone called some version of Dostoevsky, read him (or her)
Also - Notes From Underground is
1. far shorter and more readable than C & P
2. gave much deeper insight into the human condition and
3. aroused much stronger and deeper emotion when reading
Somewhat related to 4, novels are a powerful medium for communicating meaningful human thought patterns but also action patterns. Often characters we admire in novels that can help us flesh out the things we truly want to be. I think the novel is a powerful medium for this in the same way nonfiction books help us learn other facts and patterns. They have the time and space to grow the character. Maybe you can sum up what you learned from a nonfiction book in a paragraph, but the things you learned you really learned and you couldn’t have done it by only reading a paragraph.
Something about fiction allows an author to communicate deeply true things in a more effective way. For the same reason stories of all kinds have always been effective. Good is good, evil is evil, truth matters, the things you do matter. These are the qualities of a hero, and you could be like that, this is a villain and you could be that too. The most important things in life to get right. These sound trite when you just say them, so we show them, back to the village shaman and the traveling bards with their poems. And because of the available length and the depth novels can flesh out these stories in a way that other mediums struggle to match.
To me reading novels feels like packing more life(/lives) into my short mortal life. Vs watching short form videos which siphons life away. (reading non-fiction or blog posts is just living life in normal time). When you read a novel you get to imagine yourself immersed in another world and experience the most interesting parts of a characters life in sped up time. The same is true for a good tv show or a very good movie, but in a movie you usually don't get enough time to identify with the characters properly. (When I say very good I mean very good at letting you get lost in the world and identify with the characters, not necessarily a very good piece of art)
You mention movies' packaging problem — expensive, wide appeal needed — novels have a packaging problem too.
Historically, it was the most efficient to bundle an idea into a stack of pages the length of a "book" because of shipping and retail sales. Generally a 250-300 page book "looks" the most impressive on a shelf, "feels" like good value for your dollar, and isn't too intimidating.
I understand that often, publishers would push authors of short books to add pages, or push authors of long books to cut pages, in order to meet the aesthetic ideal. sometimes I deliberately choose books that are unusually long or short, reasoning that if the publisher couldn't win the argument to steer the book to 300 pages, there's something special.
there's a very similar phenomenon with music: Is an album really the best way to convey your artistic vision? Or just convenient because of wax vinyl and jewel cases? and in parallel to your post: why listen to albums? status? common language? purity of vision? or...?
possibly: don't read novels or listen to albums; consume the best ideas in whatever length & medium makes the most sense, be that novel or blog post or message board comment.
>Or perhaps the difference is that reading is a thing you do rather than something you consume.
Yeah, to read a novel you have to read every word. If you are distracted by something for a few seconds you're exactly where you were before, vs a movie that keeps playing. You can read faster or slower, depending on the density. Possibly something something you can adjust speed/difficulty something something the flow state? And compared to like, looking at photos you still have a beginning and an end and a clear direction, at some point you can consider you're done. When are you done looking at a painting?
1. Fiction gives authors plausible deniability to comment on matters that cannot be disclosed or discussed publicly without cost. This is probably the single most important aspect of literature, even literature that does not seem overtly political. ("I am Richard II, know ye not that!")
2. Fiction can provide important insight into the mindset and context of the historical era in which it was written.
3. Fiction can help you exercise your theory of mind in a way that is translatable/actionable in real life. This is variable though- Waiting for Godot isn't going to help here.
4. Yes, it can provide a way to gain Status if you are playing the Social Prestige game, but this seems less and less applicable unless you are constantly hobnobbing with the Oxbridge elite.
5. Related to #4, reading fiction can give you a way to communicate with the cognoscenti in a way that is discrete/funny/inside baseball. ("Mike is such a Kirillovich")
6. Reading fiction can be an exercise in interpreting ambiguity and being comfortable with it. The value of this cannot be overstated.
Not all novels are equally worthwhile.
For a meta-discussion by an author on the relationship between high art and entertainment, see the novel "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace, a work I am inordinately fond of.
What about the reason that you can learn things from novels despite them being about things that didn't happen? The events portrayed may be fiction but an author can still make statements about the human condition, politics, philosophy, etc through the narrative. They may inspire you to learn something as well--for instance, reading the Red Rising series (neoclassical sci-fi) and "I, Claudius" last year inspired me to read "The Twelve Caesars" and Tom Holland's "Dynasty" and "Pax" to learn more about the late republic/early Empire.
“However, I’m also pretty sure it’s not the full explanation, and I’m bored to death with everyone trying to explain everything this way. So let’s move in.”
I feel this so hard. Whenever my book club is struggling to get through a supposed classic, and can’t understand why everyone raves about it, someone will posit that they’re faking it for clout. But it’s a very lazy theory: if we apply ourselves we always end up with some understanding of why the book is great, even if we don’t personally vibe with it.*
*With the exception of Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon love is genuinely inexplicable to me outside of some kind of weird literary fetish or signalling dynamic.
A novel, more than any other medium I think (for some reason), is like a conversation between you and the other. You read the words given to you and interpret them against the background of your own lived experiences. Probably some of what enables that is that literal thoughts are being expressed, rather than pictures or sounds. It's all just words, so it feels most like a conversation.
All good reasons! I feel most drawn to Theory 4, or perhaps a subvariant of it, that novels are unusually good vehicles to learn about yourself. At least, that's where I ended up when I reflected on this same question recently (and somewhat contra the usual take about it being a portal to minds very different to your own).
Why is there a certain type of person who reads David Foster Wallace? Why is that person very likely white, male, middle-class, well-educated, and prone to pathological self-consciousness around their own motivations and their failure to connect with people?
If fiction is an empathy pump, the DFW guys are making a big mistake: they already know all too well what it’s like to be this kind of person! They should be reading literally anyone else to broaden their perspective. Meanwhile, DFW’s readership should be composed of self-assured working-class women of colour who have deep roots in their community, or something.
Obviously this is not a good description of reality. The stories we enjoy the most are often those where we identify strongly with the characters.
I don’t think this is a mistake: you live in your own head, you are the person whose bullshit you have to deal with most frequently. You may not be the sole source of the problems you have to solve, but you are typically the only one who can solve them.
So it’s not narcissistic to be drawn to stories about people like you. Recognising yourself is often a deeply uncomfortable experience anyway, and while some texts might directly serve up some take-home insights or morals, mostly you’re gonna have to do the work yourself.
I'm definitely on team "It's OK to read DFW." I'm sure what you suggest is statistically true. But I think you *could* still see that as an empathy pump? You could have a theory like:
1. All of us have interior lives.
2. It's very hard to talk about most aspects of those interior lives.
3. What novels do is sort of gesture at a large set of external things and let you fill in the blanks about all the things we don't know how to talk about.
4. It's very hard to fill in the blanks even if someone is similar to you, and impossible if they are very different.
5. So if you want to really appreciate that other people are not NPCs, your best bet is to read about people only slightly different from yourself.
Though I must confess that having written this theory down, it seems even more shaky than when I started...
Novels tend to demand you keep more in mind when reading them in order to have a good experience. So they train your brain to notice details better and remember them for longer.
And also if you close read the backlog of a single creator of 500 shorts you'll find there's a similar number of interesting details to be found. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a 30 second video is composed of a hell of a lot of pictures.
But the novel will punish you for not looking. You will be able to tell much faster that you missed something, and it will be a lot easier to go back and find it.
In theory at least. In practice... there are still good novels being written. And also the market has become a bit lax about standards.
The joke I like to make is "near the end of the mystery novel, when you're locking in your guess for who did it, assume the first 5 people that come to mind aren't the killer and you will perform much better than the average reader"
The genre has been optimized for The Twist. Goodharted to death. You ask if one in every 7000 people writes a novel a year, I for one am very sad to introduce you to the factory where people write 3 novels a year as their job and get paid fuck all for it.
You want to know how to survive as a writer in the age of "words too cheap to meter"? Ask the romance writers. Their automation crisis happened a long long time ago.
(A specific rec: thebibliosphere on tumblr. interesting for a lot of reasons. this is but one of them)
I think theories need to split between roughly two types of reading: reading for entertainment vs reading for art or aesthetic experience. Obviously these blur into one another within the same book, etc. But I think reading for entertainment is pretty much like doing anything else for entertainment (Theory 7 with a dash of Theory 1). Reading for aesthetic experience, though, is more like going to an art gallery or hiking up a mountain. For me, that is a kind of experience that is (a) about the time spent doing it, during which one is reminded of time passing (what the Greeks called aisthesis) rather than passing the time (being absorbed in entertainment); (b) about constantly second-guessing & monitoring how the author did it, admiring the craft, especially the formal aspects (i.e. the writing itself, not what it is about).
Sidenote: among professional novel readers (literature professors) I find they rarely talk about their personal reading & neither do I actually. Which makes me doubt the status thing for literary types (although they are obsessed with status more broadly). Also, a standard theory in book history is that the novel in particular is a private form, unlike almost all other popular entertainment up to the 18th C. when it became popular. So the idea is it's the least status- or social-based medium. And then it's either about escapism or living a kind of emotional or personal life you couldn't through irl means. As Harrold Bloom said, "In this life, we can't know enough people [without reading novels]". I don't necessarily agree with this stuff but it's a common view literary studies.
Curious, why don't you agree with Harold Bloom's view? It seems to me that novels are the only way to access other human experiences. I guess memoirs are another way--but I don't particularly trust the writing here --they feel more like performative narratives
1) You're definitely underestimating how prolific authors can be; long series and trope-y genres can support rapid writing. Glynn Stewart, for an example I follow (I enjoy the Starship's Mage and Aether Spheres series, but he definitely has go-to plot and character beats; reading most of his series definitely got annoyingly samey and was probably a mistake): not counting novellas, published 4 books in 2025 and 6 in 2024. (I'm not sure how you'd count webserial authors: a lot of the serials I follow do 2-3 chapters a week, but chapter sizes vary and I'm not sure how much editing would add time or remove words.)
2) A theory-5-adjacent reason I like novels for speculative fiction: prose has lower price pressure on worldbuilding and narrative choices vs other media. Live action is especially price shifted: a film-maker's modern environment is cheap to film, anything else has a significant budget for location, sets, props, effects, etc. Comics get close; they require authors more strongly decide how things look, and don't idiomatically have enough words to rigidly define worldbuilding (and, for a more pure theory 5 reason, are more expensive in general), but drawing fantastic worlds isn't much harder than describing them. Animation is like comics, except movement is expensive (and it's generally way more expensive).
3) A minor theory-7-related hot take: decent video games aren't really much worse than novels as a way to spend time. Novels can get much better, and bad games can get skinner-box-like, but video games are at least as much a thing you do, just in different (possibly complimentary) ways. (Otherwise: games are worse for pure status reasons; cultivate different, but possibly also good, skills; are at least pretty good for shared context; and are bad at legible mind-space (but maybe better at exploring the potential tools in weird indie stuff than other media?). Purity of vision is weird: major releases are much worse, but my (poorly-informed) impression is that the weird indie space is comparable.)
More theories:
- You're not looking at a screen when reading a novel (even if you're reading an e-book, the screen might not be backlit).
- You're more likely to pause when reading a book. When I read, I often backtrack, linger on a few sentences, or look away from the book for minutes at a time.
- Your mind switches context a lot more when watching short-form content. Even movies and TV often switch between A, B, and C plots every few minutes.
- Related: Books are less hectic and fast-paced than movies and TV. I think this is the biggest factor. A slow, calm book will make me feel at peace, as will a slow, calm movie or TV show (e.g. Studio Ghibli movies). A fast-paced web serial like Chili and the Chocolate Factory will do the opposite.
I specifically started reading novels to combat phone addiction, and it works (at least, for me). That fact that one can be an antidote to the other is revealing-- even if not perfectly understood. Even if you're not able to engage with a book club, you're in a constant dialogue with yourself as you read, and that's also a type of a social outlet. Now, novels compared to movies is different. Both help me access another type of human experience and allow it to shape my character as well. I read A Separate Peace in high school, and it still haunts me. So do scenes from the movie Mystic River. But my success rate of having another character's experience embedded into me is higher with novels. I think it's because novels allow a reader's imagination to more slowly (and therefore more permanently) embed the experience. With reading, you can just sit there and stew on a paragraph for a half-hour--but can't with a movie scene
Unrelated points - IME the true value of Dostoevsky is pointing you to the "American Dostoevsky", "Dostoevsky of Texas", "Dime Store Dostoevsky" - all of whom are much more readable than the regular Dostoevsky. 95% of the grand thematic content, 200% more readable. If someone called some version of Dostoevsky, read him (or her)
Also - Notes From Underground is
1. far shorter and more readable than C & P
2. gave much deeper insight into the human condition and
3. aroused much stronger and deeper emotion when reading
Somewhat related to 4, novels are a powerful medium for communicating meaningful human thought patterns but also action patterns. Often characters we admire in novels that can help us flesh out the things we truly want to be. I think the novel is a powerful medium for this in the same way nonfiction books help us learn other facts and patterns. They have the time and space to grow the character. Maybe you can sum up what you learned from a nonfiction book in a paragraph, but the things you learned you really learned and you couldn’t have done it by only reading a paragraph.
Something about fiction allows an author to communicate deeply true things in a more effective way. For the same reason stories of all kinds have always been effective. Good is good, evil is evil, truth matters, the things you do matter. These are the qualities of a hero, and you could be like that, this is a villain and you could be that too. The most important things in life to get right. These sound trite when you just say them, so we show them, back to the village shaman and the traveling bards with their poems. And because of the available length and the depth novels can flesh out these stories in a way that other mediums struggle to match.
To me reading novels feels like packing more life(/lives) into my short mortal life. Vs watching short form videos which siphons life away. (reading non-fiction or blog posts is just living life in normal time). When you read a novel you get to imagine yourself immersed in another world and experience the most interesting parts of a characters life in sped up time. The same is true for a good tv show or a very good movie, but in a movie you usually don't get enough time to identify with the characters properly. (When I say very good I mean very good at letting you get lost in the world and identify with the characters, not necessarily a very good piece of art)
You mention movies' packaging problem — expensive, wide appeal needed — novels have a packaging problem too.
Historically, it was the most efficient to bundle an idea into a stack of pages the length of a "book" because of shipping and retail sales. Generally a 250-300 page book "looks" the most impressive on a shelf, "feels" like good value for your dollar, and isn't too intimidating.
I understand that often, publishers would push authors of short books to add pages, or push authors of long books to cut pages, in order to meet the aesthetic ideal. sometimes I deliberately choose books that are unusually long or short, reasoning that if the publisher couldn't win the argument to steer the book to 300 pages, there's something special.
with more book sales done online, and more consumption on e-reader, there's more variance in book length (https://writersandpublishersnetwork.com/book-and-ebook-lengths-are-changing/).
there's a very similar phenomenon with music: Is an album really the best way to convey your artistic vision? Or just convenient because of wax vinyl and jewel cases? and in parallel to your post: why listen to albums? status? common language? purity of vision? or...?
possibly: don't read novels or listen to albums; consume the best ideas in whatever length & medium makes the most sense, be that novel or blog post or message board comment.
>Or perhaps the difference is that reading is a thing you do rather than something you consume.
Yeah, to read a novel you have to read every word. If you are distracted by something for a few seconds you're exactly where you were before, vs a movie that keeps playing. You can read faster or slower, depending on the density. Possibly something something you can adjust speed/difficulty something something the flow state? And compared to like, looking at photos you still have a beginning and an end and a clear direction, at some point you can consider you're done. When are you done looking at a painting?
There are many valid reasons to read fiction.
1. Fiction gives authors plausible deniability to comment on matters that cannot be disclosed or discussed publicly without cost. This is probably the single most important aspect of literature, even literature that does not seem overtly political. ("I am Richard II, know ye not that!")
2. Fiction can provide important insight into the mindset and context of the historical era in which it was written.
3. Fiction can help you exercise your theory of mind in a way that is translatable/actionable in real life. This is variable though- Waiting for Godot isn't going to help here.
4. Yes, it can provide a way to gain Status if you are playing the Social Prestige game, but this seems less and less applicable unless you are constantly hobnobbing with the Oxbridge elite.
5. Related to #4, reading fiction can give you a way to communicate with the cognoscenti in a way that is discrete/funny/inside baseball. ("Mike is such a Kirillovich")
6. Reading fiction can be an exercise in interpreting ambiguity and being comfortable with it. The value of this cannot be overstated.
Not all novels are equally worthwhile.
For a meta-discussion by an author on the relationship between high art and entertainment, see the novel "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace, a work I am inordinately fond of.
What about the reason that you can learn things from novels despite them being about things that didn't happen? The events portrayed may be fiction but an author can still make statements about the human condition, politics, philosophy, etc through the narrative. They may inspire you to learn something as well--for instance, reading the Red Rising series (neoclassical sci-fi) and "I, Claudius" last year inspired me to read "The Twelve Caesars" and Tom Holland's "Dynasty" and "Pax" to learn more about the late republic/early Empire.
“However, I’m also pretty sure it’s not the full explanation, and I’m bored to death with everyone trying to explain everything this way. So let’s move in.”
I feel this so hard. Whenever my book club is struggling to get through a supposed classic, and can’t understand why everyone raves about it, someone will posit that they’re faking it for clout. But it’s a very lazy theory: if we apply ourselves we always end up with some understanding of why the book is great, even if we don’t personally vibe with it.*
*With the exception of Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon love is genuinely inexplicable to me outside of some kind of weird literary fetish or signalling dynamic.
A novel, more than any other medium I think (for some reason), is like a conversation between you and the other. You read the words given to you and interpret them against the background of your own lived experiences. Probably some of what enables that is that literal thoughts are being expressed, rather than pictures or sounds. It's all just words, so it feels most like a conversation.
Philip Larkin, "A Study of Reading Habits"
When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.
Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.
Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.
All good reasons! I feel most drawn to Theory 4, or perhaps a subvariant of it, that novels are unusually good vehicles to learn about yourself. At least, that's where I ended up when I reflected on this same question recently (and somewhat contra the usual take about it being a portal to minds very different to your own).
Why is there a certain type of person who reads David Foster Wallace? Why is that person very likely white, male, middle-class, well-educated, and prone to pathological self-consciousness around their own motivations and their failure to connect with people?
If fiction is an empathy pump, the DFW guys are making a big mistake: they already know all too well what it’s like to be this kind of person! They should be reading literally anyone else to broaden their perspective. Meanwhile, DFW’s readership should be composed of self-assured working-class women of colour who have deep roots in their community, or something.
Obviously this is not a good description of reality. The stories we enjoy the most are often those where we identify strongly with the characters.
I don’t think this is a mistake: you live in your own head, you are the person whose bullshit you have to deal with most frequently. You may not be the sole source of the problems you have to solve, but you are typically the only one who can solve them.
So it’s not narcissistic to be drawn to stories about people like you. Recognising yourself is often a deeply uncomfortable experience anyway, and while some texts might directly serve up some take-home insights or morals, mostly you’re gonna have to do the work yourself.
I'm definitely on team "It's OK to read DFW." I'm sure what you suggest is statistically true. But I think you *could* still see that as an empathy pump? You could have a theory like:
1. All of us have interior lives.
2. It's very hard to talk about most aspects of those interior lives.
3. What novels do is sort of gesture at a large set of external things and let you fill in the blanks about all the things we don't know how to talk about.
4. It's very hard to fill in the blanks even if someone is similar to you, and impossible if they are very different.
5. So if you want to really appreciate that other people are not NPCs, your best bet is to read about people only slightly different from yourself.
Though I must confess that having written this theory down, it seems even more shaky than when I started...
Novels tend to demand you keep more in mind when reading them in order to have a good experience. So they train your brain to notice details better and remember them for longer.
And also if you close read the backlog of a single creator of 500 shorts you'll find there's a similar number of interesting details to be found. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a 30 second video is composed of a hell of a lot of pictures.
But the novel will punish you for not looking. You will be able to tell much faster that you missed something, and it will be a lot easier to go back and find it.
In theory at least. In practice... there are still good novels being written. And also the market has become a bit lax about standards.
The joke I like to make is "near the end of the mystery novel, when you're locking in your guess for who did it, assume the first 5 people that come to mind aren't the killer and you will perform much better than the average reader"
The genre has been optimized for The Twist. Goodharted to death. You ask if one in every 7000 people writes a novel a year, I for one am very sad to introduce you to the factory where people write 3 novels a year as their job and get paid fuck all for it.
You want to know how to survive as a writer in the age of "words too cheap to meter"? Ask the romance writers. Their automation crisis happened a long long time ago.
(A specific rec: thebibliosphere on tumblr. interesting for a lot of reasons. this is but one of them)