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I looked for a nice book to read on the plane. I couldn't find one. What's up with that? There are nine trillion books in the world and I couldn't find a single one that I imagined would interest me for more than a paragraph. I blame the Internet.
I consume content on the Internet like an anteater with a vacuum attachment. I like my information in small bites, no fat. And skip the fiction, please. Reality is far more interesting than wading through six hundred pages of some ghost writer's imagined universe to figure out which imaginary character killed which other imaginary character. I want to read about Lady Gaga wearing a dress made out of a homeless guy's gutted carcass because she cares deeply about the economy. Can your crime novel give me that? I didn't think so.
-- Scott Adams
Scott may be a certified genius, as he often likes to point out, but he obviously is not a literary man. I don't think a summary paragraph could do "Paradise Lost" or the "Iliad" justice. The point is not so much what happens to imaginary characters, but in the way it is told, the way the narrative and the poetry pulls us into this conjured world, so that through well-drawn characters and narratives, we can live and struggle and love and die a thousand times within the safe comfort of our reading chair.
I can see how some people might not feel the magic of that, but not having much of a life of my own, I can hardly imagine the worth of this life without this literary dimension of experiencing. And surely I was not fully alive before finally getting to Nabokov's "Lolita".
I consume content on the Internet like an anteater with a vacuum attachment. I like my information in small bites, no fat. And skip the fiction, please. Reality is far more interesting than wading through six hundred pages of some ghost writer's imagined universe to figure out which imaginary character killed which other imaginary character. I want to read about Lady Gaga wearing a dress made out of a homeless guy's gutted carcass because she cares deeply about the economy. Can your crime novel give me that? I didn't think so.
-- Scott Adams
Scott may be a certified genius, as he often likes to point out, but he obviously is not a literary man. I don't think a summary paragraph could do "Paradise Lost" or the "Iliad" justice. The point is not so much what happens to imaginary characters, but in the way it is told, the way the narrative and the poetry pulls us into this conjured world, so that through well-drawn characters and narratives, we can live and struggle and love and die a thousand times within the safe comfort of our reading chair.
I can see how some people might not feel the magic of that, but not having much of a life of my own, I can hardly imagine the worth of this life without this literary dimension of experiencing. And surely I was not fully alive before finally getting to Nabokov's "Lolita".
