Or non-novel readers have the time to cure cancer, perfect solar energy, bring about world peace and perfect their golf games.
But if they don't read novels, then they don't refresh their brains and don't work as effectively. One must read something other than reference books or they will become crazy science freaks that create things like Edward Scissorhands.
any book, be it trashy romance, adventure, sci fi etc which has the ability to grasp ones mind and let one leave the mundenaities (?) of every day life, is worth a read. As the saying goes, man cannot live by bread alone and to stimulate ones imagination is as important to the human psych as eating is for the body. Life has too many hard facts attached to it, sometimes you've just got to go somewhere else in your mind and a book beats everything else - in fact it is worrying how somebody could even come up with such a worrying topic - shame on you
peachstate kid wrote:But if they don't read novels, then they don't refresh their brains and don't work as effectively. One must read something other than reference books or they will become crazy science freaks that create things like Edward Scissorhands.
I think Edward Scissorhands is cool and Johnny Depp is one sexy guy.
Speaking as a published novelist, I have to say this whole thread is way off base. People crave stories and they have always gotten them, going back to the campfires of primitive man where they listened to tales told by the tribal storyteller. Novelists--
good and bad--fill a deep need in the human spirit to transcend the boring details of everyday life, to go beyond the familiar into the realm of imagination. Novels, at their best, are magic carpet rides transporting us far from the everyday. Only a fool would deny us their consolation.
I could never find a book that I wanted to read so I went to grad school in English. The unvarnished truth.
Today, I read more history than fiction. A great deal of fiction is just pedestrian, hence, the master's degree.
I remember reading a book which turned out to be a love story. An absorbing and well-written love story. It was authored by a Brit and may have won the Booker and dealt with a woman reporter in Egypt during WWII. I finally decided that love is worth writing about. Not my loves, but love as an ideal.
So, how about having sex, rather than reading novels?
To each his own. Some see reading novels as a waste of time, but it's kind of cool to get someone else's outlook on life. Plus, it expands the ol' vocab, so you sound better talking, so your boss will promote you. Or not. But if you don't see it worthwhile, you don't. I respect your opinion and I think others who replied to this topic should, too.
Jane Austen - in Chapter Five of Northanger Abbey:
Yes, novels; for I will not adopt
that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers,
of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances,
to the number of which they are themselves adding -- joining with
their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such
works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own
heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn
over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one
novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can
she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us
leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their
leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of
the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one
another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have
afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any
other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition
has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our
foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities
of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of
the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines
of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and
a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens -- there
seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing
the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances
which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am
no novel-reader -- I seldom look into novels -- Do not imagine that
I often read novels -- It is really very well for a novel." Such
is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss -- ?" "Oh!
It is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down
her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It
is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some
work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in
which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest
delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and
humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now,
had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator,
instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book,
and told its name; though the chances must be against her being
occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either
the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste:
the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement
of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics
of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their
language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable
idea of the age that could endure it.
