If you have friends who ask, why it is necessary to read fiction, advise them to look through the content of the lecture by Neil Gaiman:
“It is important for people to explain on whose side they are. It is a sort of a declaration of interest. So, I’m going to talk with you about reading. The fact that fiction reading, reading for pleasure is one of the most important things in life.
Literate people read fiction.
In literature, there are two purposes:
First, it opens your dependence on reading. The thirst to know what will happen next, the desire of turning the page, the need to continue, even if it is hard, because someone is in trouble and you have to find out what it’s all over… This is a real drive. It makes learn new words, to think differently, to keep moving forward. To discover that reading itself is a delight. Once realizing that, you’re on the road to continuous reading.
The simplest way to grow up educated children with guarantee is to teach them to read and show that reading is a pleasant entertainment. The simpliest is to get the books they like, give them access to these books, and allow them to read them.
There are no bad writers for children, if the children want to read their books and are looking for them, because all children are different. They find the stories they need, and they go into these stories. The beaten and worn out idea isn’t beaten and not worn out for children. Bacause the child is discovering it for the first time for himself. Do not turn away children from reading just because you feel as if they are reading the wrong things.
And the second thing that makes fiction – it generates empathy. When you watch a TV show or movie, you look at the things that happen to other people. Narrative prose – it is something that can be produced only by you. You use 33 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, you alone, with your fantasy and imagination, create a world, inhabit it and look around with someone else’s eyes. You start to feel things, visit places and worlds, which you would not know. You will learn that the outside world is also you. You become someone else, and when you return to your own world, something in you will change a little.
Empathy is a tool that gathers people together and doesn’t allow you to behave like a narcissistic loner.
You will also find in the books something vitally important for the existence of this world. And here it is: the world does not to be that way. Things can change.
Libraries – is freedom, freedom to read, freedom to communicate. This education (which does not end on the day when we leave school or university), it is leisure; this is a shelter and access to the information.
It is important to read the book every day, at least a little, if you have enough time. This will inevitably result in the corresponding result, and eventually you do start to notice that by reading books, your life has changed dramatically for the better. If you worked every day to learn something new in small portions, then the time will come, and these small portions will form in your mind a great amount of knowledge that can make you an expert in a particular field of activity.
Therefore, everyone needs to think about whether it is better to spend free time reading books, succumbing to the influence of the great thinkers, rather than sit and kill life in torture near a television or playing computer games, which lead to the inevitable degradation of the individual at all levels.
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