NEIL GAIMAN ON THE IMPORTANCE OF READING FICTION

Neill Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (New York: William Morrow, 2016) (From "Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming: The Reading Agency Lecture, 2013): "It's important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of member's interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I'm going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things." Id. at 4, 4. "We navigate the world with words, and as the world slips not the Web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we're reading." "People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only get you so far." "The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity." Id. at 6-7. "Literate people read fiction, and fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug treading, The drive to know what happens next, to want totter the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end . . .  [] The second thing that fiction does is to build empathy. . . .  Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals." You're also finding out something as you read that will be really important for making your way in the world, And it's this: THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT." Id. at 6-8.).