31–40 of 44 posts
> But your great grandfather was reading Cicero in Latin. My great-grandfathers certainly were not.
I'm actually sympathetic with his perspective, and I was frustrated by Mary Beard's "SQPR" when she kept saying things like "of course, this list of consuls cannot possibly be right", because, of course ancient people can't even keep a quality list over 300 years. And in any case, they were a lot closer to it that Beard is, so it's as good as it's going to get. I find what passes for virtue in elite circles to be appalling, self-righteous, and uninteresting, so I'm not likely to be reading new books without good quality recommendations. (But that would be the case anyway, I only have N book-readings to spend in my life, no point spending them on anything poor.)
But fiction is absolutely worth reading. First, as entertainment it beats all the passive forms. Also, books don't dumb things down to the lowest denominator like American television does. But you can actually learn a lot from fiction. O'Henry gives a picture of NYC in 1900, Jane Austen gives a flavor of lower-elite Edwardian life, etc. Good fiction tends to deal with tensions of life, like duty/delight, or in Austen's case the need to marry well to have enough money to live like you were raised but you also need to find a man worth marrying. And, of course, the perspectives you get reading Iliad, Beowulf, Treasure Island, and Tolkien are all very different, which will expand your mind, too.
Instead of "walking the aisles of Barnes & Noble," I wonder if the author of this piece has tried looking up actual sales figures? Yes, people do buy books. Mostly fiction. More than a billion books are sold per year in the US. Sales of books have been steady & mostly rising over the past two decades. Romance is the most popular fiction genre, but not by huge margin. Thrillers are the runner-up, then science fiction, then fantasy.
It's really not promising that this article opens with flagrant conjecture.
> The average ancient historian led troops […] The average modern historian passed a few tests
The average ancient historian just made stuff up sometimes. A guy like Plutarch writes with a massive slant, and because the average ancient historian was one of maybe 5 guys, he's often all we've got. The average modern historian, by contrast, does the actual rigorous scholarship required to get concrete information out of historical sources. I'm no historian, and I have little exposure to historiography, but even I can tell this is a ridiculous way to look at history.
> Contrast Xenophon with Mary Beard, who studied at Cambridge and now teaches at Cambridge.
Sure, let's. What will we discuss? The quality of her scholarship? Inaccuracies in her work?
> She holds the same opinions as everyone else at Cambridge. She’s remarked before that, “I actually can’t understand what it would be to be a woman without being a feminist.” This seems like a peculiar failing for an ancient historian.
Clearly that was too much to hope for. We're discussing "wokeness" or whatever. I don't see what it has to do with her body of work. Anyway, she's obviously saying she can't understand contemporary women who are not feminists, but maybe that flew over the author's head.
> I don’t know if she’s ever talked publicly about religion or democracy or climate change or immigration, but I could tell you exactly what she thinks about these things anyway. So why would you bother reading what she thinks about Rome?
Because she knows more about Rome than I do, obviously. She's a historian, not a political pundit. Anyway, I thought reading books for entertainment was "ridiculous," but here you are, reading about Rome. That's entertainment. It's okay—I like Rome too. You don't have to pretend like you're reading about the second Punic war to "cultivate wisdom." You can admit you enjoy it.
> There are hundreds of people with just as much experience of the human condition as Xenophon who have written great books throughout the millennia […] Bernal Díaz del Castillo was a conquistador who wrote about conquering the Aztec Empire. […] Have you read all of these? If not, why would you even consider picking up another book written by another Cambridge professor?
Right, but those aren't historians. Those are memoirists, and their accounts of their own lives are not reliable. Bernal Díaz del Castillo the conquistador was not a neutral observer of the Aztec Empire.
Gee, if only there were some rigorous, academic discipline where experts (perhaps Cambridge professors) sifted through primary sources to discover the truth…
> you can’t find [people with "unique experiences and perspectives"] by traveling around the world. The world is too hyperconnected now, and everyone is converging to the same opinions.
Go downtown and sit next to the first person you see begging on the street. I guarantee they've had experiences which would astonish you, and you won't even have travelled outside the city limits. Honestly, some people are so quick to assume they know everything.
I learned so many things from fictional works.
Authors don’t just make up lies and say whatever they want. Fiction does not mean everything is nonsense. The worlds that you read about have to be believable and for that to be possible, things have to at least be partially consistent with what we understand of the world.
So many authors do real research when they write a fiction novel so that the world that they’re building can be convincing.
For instance:
* I learned how to drive a stick shift from a Young Bond novel. The author didn’t make anything up, they actually described the way that the clutch mechanism works, and how the character was controlling it with the pedals.
* I learned about Navajo code talkers from a fictional book about World War II.
* I learned about cowpox being used as a smallpox vaccine from a fictional book about a new smallpox outbreak in New York City.
* I learned that Gatorade was developed in Florida from Taken by Edward Bloor.
* I learned a lot about the reformation and the Quakers and early colonial America from the Baroque Cycle, because Neal Stephenson did real research to write that book.
Is everything that happened in the book real? No, because obviously Daniel Waterhouse didn’t exist, didn’t found MIT, and didn’t have some mechanical LLM in the 1600s.
Did some of the things in the book actually happen in real life in order for the author to set that book in the time period? Yes. Like IOUs from goldsmiths acting as paper money, and the standardization of coinage by Isaac Newton.
There is so much factual information encoded into the pages of fictional works that this is the stupidest thing I have ever read on any platform in any circumstance ever.
Pure anti-intellectualism of the highest order. An attempt to undo The Enlightenment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The mistake is thinking of entertainment as a fungible resource. Film is its own art form. The novel is its own art form. They serve completely different purposes and each gives the audience a unique experience that can't be replicated in any other medium. It's sad to me that people think like this. It's a very limited and superficial way to experience the world.
At the population level, it is fungible, though. Giving a certain number of hours dedicated to passive entertainment, many more people prefer to watch a terrible tv show on Netflix than to read a masterpiece of literature. It could be because the tv show is more "entertaining" (which is tautological), a desire for social conformity (people can discuss more easily with others the latest tv show than Anna Karenina), or…
My problem is with statements like "paper is an inferior entertainment platform". To me, this is assuming that these different media are fundamentally providing the same kind of experience, which I disagree with.
I see your point about the cognitive effort of reading, though. I guess it depends on how fluently one can read, which depends on how much exposure to books one got as a kid.
> There are two sides to this debate: entertainment or information. Unfortunately, reading books for entertainment is ridiculous. You do not live in a log cabin on the prairie. You have Netflix, you have video games, you have TikTok, you have Twitter (you really spend too much time on Twitter anon). No one reads books for entertainment anymore, because paper is an inferior entertainment platform. I'm not reading this…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the population level, it is fungible, though. Giving a certain number of hours dedicated to passive entertainment, many more people prefer to watch a terrible tv show on Netflix than to read a masterpiece of literature. It could be because the tv show is more "entertaining" (which is tautological), a desire for social conformity (people can discuss more easily with others the latest tv show than Anna Karenina), or…
It's not even about quality. I consider films like There Will Be Blood or TV shows like Deadwood to be comparable in quality to the greatest works of world literature. I've also gotten a lot of joy and entertainment out of reading crappy books. My problem is with statements like "paper is an inferior entertainment platform". To me, this is assuming that these different media are fundamentally providing the same kind…
For the more intellectually sophisticated person (does not mean "better" person, to be clear), "entertainment type" is not fungible (movies as art, advertisement as investigation into the psychology of the masses, etc.) but for the vast majority of people, it is just a way to spend time.
You are referring to critically acclaimed movies and tv shows, but for the majority of people, leisure time in front of the tv is not spent bouncing between Fellini, Von Trier, PTA, Kubrick, et similia, but binge-watching the latest terrible Netflix tv show.
It is the same with food: we like to think that what prevents the masses from enjoying fine dining is the cost of the experience, but in reality, to many (myself included, most of the time), French fries with mayonnaise, a burger, and some ice cream is just a better proposition.
I disagree myself wiht the statement that paper is inferior, entertainment-wise, to tv, games, and tiktok--they all overstimulate me, I feel dirty after being on tiktok for 20 minutes and I feel as clean as a whistle after reading for 3 hours, in addition to the subtle intellectual stimulation I get from reading-- but in terms of choices made by people, books are certainly the losing party.
That’s certainly an opinion. I’m not convinced that it's a good one, but it’s an interesting one. I think it’s probably important to remember two things: 1) the novel is a relatively modern invention — Don Quixote is often thought of as the first novel, and it was written in 1605, but 2) fiction clearly is not. The Iliad, for instance. In fact, what we think of as “history”, a recounting of events strongly tied to fa…
It's not 'almost certainly'. Modern history books written by academics contain an historiography, references to archeological researchs, reference to archives when some exist (remarquably, while the French revolutionary council archived their discussions and those were kept since 1792, no historian reference them before 1998, and since then, every academic book do :/), linguistic research, economics (local economy: what was produced, what was imported) and probably other fields I never recognised/took interest in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not even about quality. I consider films like There Will Be Blood or TV shows like Deadwood to be comparable in quality to the greatest works of world literature. I've also gotten a lot of joy and entertainment out of reading crappy books. My problem is with statements like "paper is an inferior entertainment platform". To me, this is assuming that these different media are fundamentally providing the same kind…
The problem is that you are talking about your experience, and not about the distribution of experience of people, which is why I wrote "at the population level". For the more intellectually sophisticated person (does not mean "better" person, to be clear), "entertainment type" is not fungible (movies as art, advertisement as investigation into the psychology of the masses, etc.) but for the vast majority of people,…