11 ms·
You're missing out. I think it has to do with depth. A real world parallel: I recently travelled by car with no internet access with a friend for 3 days. The le
by Lucadg 7y ago
You're missing out. I think it has to do with depth.
A real world parallel: I recently travelled by car with no internet access with a friend for 3 days.
The level and depth of the conversation was surprisingly high because we could build on each precedent layer. No interruptions meant a higher architecture, so to speak.
Books can take you in places nothing else can.
- Gene_Parmesan 7y agoExactly. For good or bad, reading a book is essentially an act of conversation-at-a-distance with the author. Reading is very much an active activity, as opposed to, say, watching television. The TV shows you all there is to the story in pictures; almost no imagination required. A book, meanwhile, requires you and the author to work together to build up whatever structures they're trying to create in your brain. It's really fascinating from a meta/philosophical sense. So a great book is like a great conversationalist; it can build a vibrant world of rich complexity, whether fiction or non-fiction. I would list Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid as one of these. Read that book and then imagine the author trying to present its complexities in a series of blog posts. But a bad book is as bad as a bad conversationalist. Reading a bad fiction book will make you feel like you're watching campy soaps, or trying to listen to an incoherent storyteller; reading a bad non-fiction book will either make you wish you had just read an article on the topic, or worse, will make you feel manipulated or lied to.