Man Carrying Thing on YouTube, in a video entitled “Self-help is dead. It’s time to read fiction”, is quite amusing and acerbic on literature and how it is framed (h/t Daniel), and he also says a thing or two germane to my interest in long books and what we are doing when we read, especially in the context of AI’s increasing prevalence.

See for instance his comments on “reading as a tool” (from 2:11):

“There’s this pervasive idea and I think it starts in primary education that reading is a necessary punishment in order to extract value from a book. That reading is a painful challenge but worth it if you can extract key information that can be useful to you. I think it starts out with reading Great Expectations looking for the answers in your quiz about what Dickens’s moral of the story is.”

He goes on to suggest (though this is news to me!) that The Count of Monte Cristo has achieved sudden popularity (from 4:40), and that this says something about people’s desire to recover agency from culture:

“People today are diving into this like 1200-page book in order to feel something, in order to have an experience, not to learn valuable lessons about life, but just to live in this and to have an experience outside of your own. The same thing I see happening with Lonesome Dove, these huge epic books that people are gravitating towards simply because it’s entertaining. [. . .] People want to have their thoughts returned to them. That fiction is an exercise in your imagination. It’s an exercise in your consciousness. It’s a deeply quiet and active activity. People are tired of being passive, of having being inundated with information, entertainments, with frivolous things. People want to have their thoughts returned to them.”

“Reading fiction is back,” he concludes. I’m not sure I’m convinced, but nice if true.