Five Things Only Fiction Can Teach You
Hello,
I have just posted a new video on my books channel ‘Nick Reads’.
It’s about why you should read fiction, and I really like this one. I draw on all my years of studying and reading fiction and condense it down to five points.
Someone on here recently asked me ‘What is literature for?’ and hopefully this answers it.
I have accidentally moved into the educational space, but I hope you will enjoy the video.
If you do me a favour and watch this one all the way through for the algorithm, I may even release a new Dixon Cox episode tonight.
Watch the video below.
Thanks!
Nick
I am not a great fiction reader, so I found this video very encouraging in that direction. As I am a painfully slow reader and can only do so (with fiction anyway) in complete silence - or just normal outdoors sounds like birdsong and wind - without my mind getting distracted by TV, music or talking nearby, the idea of even knowing where to start is challenging enough. By the way, all those paperbacks you presented looked as if they have been carefully treated. I presume you never turn down the page corners !
What a joy it was to hear Nick reference the mighty Walt Whitman: no wonder Nick's subscribers count in the multitudes, and as numerous as the 'leaves of grass'.
Nick's first estimation of the value of fiction as being in its essence of the infinity of the imagination is also a refutation of the modern managerial utilitarian treadmill of the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Possibly the purest incantation of this estimation of the infinity of literary imagination is Eliot's (Four Quartets) 'Footfalls echo in the memory: Down the passage we did not take: Towards the door we never opened...'
However, Shakespeare wandered these 'untrod' passages a long time before... (Hamlet) 'O God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself the king of infinite space...'
Shakespeare must have been alive to the metaphors of the Christian parables, whether of the feeding of the multitudes, the fishers of men; Jonah and the Whale...
Nick's 'Five Things Only Fiction Can Teach You' is a whole and nutritious banquet, especially as it is leavened in the absence of the spectre of Carol Vorderman (!)