…Is the question asked on the BBC Magazine website. So, do we? I have to admit that I like to learn something new when reading a novel, even if it’s only a description, a scene being set of a place I’ve never been. There’s nothing like it, being inside someone else’s head. And that’s something that all the movie-watching, gaming and newspaper-reading in the universe could never give us in a million years. Reading is a form of telepathy and I believe it helps develop true empathy.
So no, you don’t need books to be clever at all. But books can help make us more human.
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This entry was posted
on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 1:09 pm.
January 10th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Hah. They cite Victoria Beckham of the Spice Girls, the world’s worst dressed woman. Notable is this quote from that article:
“Books are an eco-system, the bad ones make the good ones possible,” says Prof Sutherland. “Victoria Beckham’s autobiography pays for likes of Andrew Motion.”
It’s notable because it speaks to exactly how VAPID the majority in their choices. The masses will buy a book by and about Beckham…who doesn’t read, but will have a book ghost-written about her as an autobiography to make herself more dough. The sales of that book, purchased by insipidly stupid people then pays for more notable works to be published, books by legitimate authors, read by avid, intelligent readers, the minority, of course! Cogent argument for the publication of trash? I ask you.
January 14th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
“Vapid”. How I love that word.
It’s a huge merry-go-round, isn’t it? And scary that such up-front illiteracy should fund the literate cause, as in the case of Mrs Beckham. Ah well, keeps the ghost writers in work, eh?
January 14th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
No. Do not keep the ghost writers in work. I’m tired of the sordid and the torrid, as well as the vapidly insipid leading the pack. If the illiterate want to eat crap, let them suck it in through the boob tube.