I recently had a revelation about books. I can't read novels. I just can't do it. The last one I can remember reading all the way through was The Hobbit. I was only able to finish that because I was able to visualize all the characters based on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I tried reading "Pillars of the Earth" and I stopped after roughly 100 pages because my desire to save myself 40 hours of time (900 more pages at ~25 pages/hour) was far greater than my desire to know what happens. So I find that novels are (for the most part) pointless and I'll explain why.
Too Much Time Spent
Jerry Seinfeld said it best when he described why he will never make movies. "You go to a bad movie, it's two hours; you're in a bad movie, it's two years." This is how I feel about reading novels. It takes far too long to tell a story that you could probably see on TV in two hours. I average about 2 pages every minute when I read. I know I'm not a super fast reader but a 200 page book would take me almost 7 hours to finish. And that's probably on the short side of most novels. I'm sure they average at least 300 pages. I'm just not willing to spend 7 hours of my life reading a story that would offer me no applicable benefits.
You Don't Learn Anything
I say this in comparison with books in which you do learn something. I'm sure if all you read were novels, you would develop over time a better vocabulary but that's really about it. Now by comparison, lets say that instead of spending 7 hours reading about Harry and Sally and their notebook they made in Rodanthe, you spent 7 hours reading about how our political system works? Or how to install kitchen cabinets? Or how to program in Ruby? Which would honestly be time better spent? I'm not saying a story can't be contained in a book where you are meant to learn something (like "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years"), as long as the book isn't dedicated to the story itself.
Entertainment Factor
A lot of people's response to my post here would be "But you like movies?! Isn't that just as pointless?" Yeah true, it's probably on par with being just as pointless, but why do people scoff when a movie is 3 hours long? It's because 3 hours is far too long to tell a story. But I think there is another difference between movies and novels. Movies entertain you without any effort on your part, but it takes effort in order for a novel to be entertaining. There is a certain amount of concentration that is required in order to digest the words on the page. I can't tell you the number of times my mind has wandered and I entirely missed a whole important page. That doesn't really happen with movies. When you watch a movie, you just have to sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.
I have to give a warning, the opinion of this post is *NOT* shared by Liz. She loves novels and reads them constantly and thinks my opinion is ridiculous. But I just can't do it. I'd say from this point forward, after this recent revelation, there is not a lot of novels I'd be willing to read.
The funny thing is about this post, for the longest time, one of my favorite books in the world was "Ender's Game", which is a novel. I can't imagine how amazing it would be as a movie, now THAT would be time well spent!
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
I Don't Like Novels
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3 comments:
I think Liz is right! Here are some reasons why I like novels...maybe Liz could add something here, too.
1. Novels force me to use my imagination. Rather than just seeing what is on the screen, like in a movie, I have to use my brain to concoct a scene that matches what the writer is describing.
2. I learn about places and people who are different from me or from where I live. A few months ago I read the book "Shantaram" which is loosely based on the experiences of the author in India, but not exactly a memoir. I learned a lot about the kind of people who are able to live as expats in India. I also learned about what it is like to live in a slum in Bombay. I don't know that I could have learned the same thing from a typical non-fiction book.
Historical fiction books, like Pillars of the Earth, teach me what it might have been like to live in the Middle Ages in a way that I can understand it, relate to it, and remember it with much more vividness than I could remember something I found on Wikipedia or the short intensity of a film.
3. Novels take me a way from my regular life of shepherding my kids and allow me to think about something else in between reading sessions. A movie is wham, bam, thank you ma'am, but a novel is slow and lingering.
Brynn also likes fiction books...here are her reasons:
1. It's fun to make up stories.
2. It teaches us not to be naughty. Every book teaches you something. (I did not prompt her to say that.)
3. It's fun to guess the story if you just look at the pictures.
"And that's about it."
One of our pastors, Glenn Packiam, posted on his blog about why he converted from non-fiction only to both fiction and non-fiction. I'll see if I can find the link!
By: Hillary on February 3, 2010 at 6:28 PM
http://glennpackiam.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/02/why-i-now-read-fiction.html
By: Hillary on February 3, 2010 at 6:31 PM
Hillary,
1. You are absolutely right about imagination, it definitely forces you to use it. And sometimes it gets the best of me. I mentioned that sometimes I find myself wandering and will miss a page and sometimes the culprit is my imagination getting lost. It happens mostly with fiction but with non-fiction as well.
2. I think you get the same benefit from movies and documentaries as far as history goes. This month Liz and I watched an HBO series called "John Adams". It was about 8 or so episodes starring Paul Giamatti documenting John Adams'life and it was phenomenal!! Assuming it was historically accurate, it would take a heck of a book to have taught me just as much as that series did. In fact, the funny thing is, just last night there was a final Jeopardy question I got right because of having watched it. The answer was Benjamin Franklin.
3. I laughed really hard when you said that a novel was slow and lingering. I guess that's what bothers me the most about reading is how long it takes. It's just a matter of you look at reading. I think maybe I'm far too fidgety and impatient as a person to see reading as an escape.
I can't really argue with Brynn though, she makes some excellent points. And picture books are awesome!
By: Fulton on February 3, 2010 at 8:29 PM
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