Book readers—and we must presume that there are at least a few of us left!— cannot help but be aware that screen-worthiness is part of the appeal. But the fact that it reads so well as a book means that it is also proudly declares itself as a novel first and last, which ironically solidifies one of its great pleasures. It lives through words on its pages, and this book comes alive in ways familiar to the sensations you get when your exercised heart pounds in your chest.
Read MoreTHE NOVEL
You can’t be doing something else when you’re reading a novel. You must do your own imagining. You also can’t check out periodically while you’re in the process of reading a novel. The moment you do, you’re not reading!
Read MoreFICTIONS REGARDED AS TRUTHS
Fiction offers more than just food for thought. It offers possibilities. Social media, conversely, offers us shallow moments of vicarious sensation. As something usually less than reportage, and certainly something substantially less than earnest invention, social media generally traffics in distraction where fiction, even in its most banal expressions, asks something more.
Read MoreMAYBE THE DONKEY IS THE HERO?
Hollow efforts to declare that windmills are dragonsspends the character’s precious life not on morality or values, but on deluded self indulgence.
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