Thoughts about Books

Lately, I've had books on the brain.  The original train of thought can be blamed entirely on this post by Schmetterling.  I feel fiction has value (see the comments I made if you don't believe me) for a variety of reasons.  But whenever I've attempted to cobble together a post in defense of fiction, it has become incredibly incoherent because I have far too many thoughts about different types of fiction and far too few methods for organizing them in a way both coherent and sane.

 

In order to obtain psychology degrees, Weber State psychology majors are required to conduct surveys of a cross-section of the student body in order to use their newly acquired methodological skills to reach conclusions about a collective mindset.  One such student came into my 20th century Russian literature class to hand out his survey.  It asked a number of questions about whether or not we valued novels as a way to learn.

 

After the class filled out the survey (and we were English majors or minors, every last one of us), our teacher quickly asked if any of us had mentioned that we did not find value in fiction.  Probably because he would have had half a mind to boot any such character out of his class.  Also to start a healthy debate.  He was good at that. 

 

But all of us had written something in defense of novels.  How they taught us new perspective by allowing us to climb into the shoes of someone completely different than us.  How they illustrated philosophy.  How they had the potential to teach history better than history textbooks ever could.  How they allowed us outlets for the escapism many of us felt is inherent in the collective consciousness as well as the collective unconsciousness.

 

Let me note that I agree with Schmetterling about what he terms "speculative fiction," and what I not-so-nicely think of as "mass market trash."  In fact, I have an intense mistrust of anything that goes straight to mass market paperback.  That usually means it's generic, it's cheap, and there is very little art to it.  Except the thing about Schmet's "speculative fiction" is that it also seems to encompass a lot of the fantasy realm--yea, even the fantasy realm that exists outside of the realm of my "mass market trash."

 

Unlike him, I have a distinct love of things that aren't real.  And I love reading about people who can create entire new realities that have their own rules, logics, and languages.  Because there is always inevitably something I learn about human nature by reading the creation of these new worlds.  Bizarre, but true.

 

I've also been thinking about books because I loaned a good friend The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.  It's hilarious non-fiction.  The premise is this: A.J. Jacobs is going to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.  And he thinks it's going to make him smarter.  As my friend pointed out when we were discussing the book, Jacobs is reading the encyclopedia for the sake of his self-esteem almost as much as for the sake of knowledge.

 

Because he didn't really read it just to know what the encyclopedia could tell him.  He also read it so that he could tell others all that he had learned, and thus impress them with his newly acquired intelligence.  The problem, you learn as you read, is that intelligence and knowledge do not equate to the same thing.

 

In fact, reading the encyclopedia didn't give him the conversational "in"s he wanted.  It didn't cause people to view him as any smarter than they thought he was.  He made such a point of introducing encyclopedic tidbits into conversation, they thought he was just odd.  And that he knew a lot of random information.  True assessments, both of them.

 

Because while I value books as a medium of learning, there is plenty to learn that cannot be taught by books. 

 

In one of my favorite episodes of Gilmore Girls, Lorelai agrees to go on a fishing date.  The only problem: she's not outdoorsy at all, so she doesn't know how to fish.  The solution she and Rory arrive at: they will learn how to fish from books.  When Rory arrives at Luke's Diner with the books in tow, and they start looking through them, Luke asks what they're doing.  When they indicate they're learning how to fish, Luke says, "Thelma.  Louise.  Possibly there' s a different way to learn how to fish."

 

Luke then proceeds (later in the episode, of course) to teach Lorelai how to fish, since he already knows how to fish.  When it comes to some things, books are no substitute for experience.  But that doesn't mean they are completely valueless.

 

So stayed tuned for my next post: books that obviously have value, because they changed me in some way!!