At the end of the course I’ve taught for the past three years, I offer some more general advice for existing-as-a-person to my students (who are studying “Digital Management”, and I am teaching them about technology.

I put up a single slide with the word

Read

which is advice you will have heard from countless Successful Entrepreneurs and Busy Executives, who tell you the importance of books, and then tell you all about these popular cognitive-science books they’ve read, or Books About Business.

I then replace it with this slide:

Read fiction

and usually say something like

Read fiction. I don’t mean “read sf to have ideas about the future.” I mean “read any form of fiction, genre or no”. Fiction allows us to have other ideas, live other lives, see other perspectives. It allows us to escape and re-consider the world from outside ourselves. It allows us to think at lengths and timescales that we may not from day-to-day. It is a shortcut to containing multitudes; to other minds.

Anyhow.

I was reading the The Atlantic writing about how they are publishing more fiction, and that put me onto this excellent quotation by Alice Munro. I like it a lot because it conveys to people for whom fiction is a linear thing, a narrative that starts and plot happens and then stops, the other thing that happens when you exist inside fiction, and why you might reread books. I will be using in future:

A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

(From her introduction to her own Selected Stories, 1996.)