this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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Different worldviews, new ways to reason about existing issues, raised awareness of other problems, cultures, people. And straight out more knowledge about many things (even if you read only fiction). Overall, you can move forward from a perhaps more simplistic version of the world.
Also, just the increased ability to read and understand stuff should not be underestimated. Many people can read, as in putting letters together to form words, but not read in the sense of understanding anything beyond the most basic of sentences. You’ll get scammed less often. get better deals, etc.
This feels very elitist, like you have a better and deeper understanding of the world just because you read books. I can tell you that it's not that simple
It is not simple, but honestly in this day and age of extremely swiftly-consumed content that is often made to be as concise as possible, books bring a deeper, more long-form perspective on many things where other media can't (or at least very rarely) do the same.
But of course it also depends what books you're reading or what other media you're consuming. TikTok vs books is probably clear cut but what about like educational YouTube or something? Not as simple.
Isn't this post specifically about fiction? When we say that a person "reads", it normally means fiction. Plus, I don't think anything else is typically measured in number of books.
I guess what I mean to ask is: what we can gain from reading works of fiction over other forms of text? Would you give the same answer given the clarification?
I don't see anything suggesting this is fiction only and I definitely don't think "reads" means "reads fiction".
What else do you read that can be measured in number of books? You wouldn't do that for news articles, blog posts, or scientific papers. Cookbooks, textbooks and dictionaries are books, but you rarely read those from cover to cover, so you wouldn't see people talking about the number of books they've read in that context.
Did you forget that non-fiction exists as a genre? Biographies and memoirs are very popular, for example.
Ah, right. Sorry about that. I'm just thinking through all the things I've read in the recent months and looking through my bookshelf. Seems our reading habits here are rather narrow.
I can't tell if you're trolling or if you just haven't visited a library or bookstore in a while, but non-fiction books come to mind?
Sorry, I'm dumb. I do go to libraries quite often, but if I'm looking at the books, it's to find something specific. I never browse the shelves.
Hey no worries, we all have those moments 😂
Non fiction obviously? You know, books about the world and stuff. Recently I read Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harrari for instance. That is not fiction and it is a book.