Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive
to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep
going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to
know how it's all going to end … that's a very real drive. And it forces
you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To
discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're
on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were
noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living
in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of
written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are
more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words,
and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate
and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each
other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation
programs only go so far.
- via
descensus Averno facilis est