We have all heard this tale; video games, Netflix, and ebooks, are seemingly a persons go-to, books are out of fashion. People no longer read paper books, the physical book is dead. Ebooks and audiobooks have taken over. Amazon has killed the bookstores and they are shutting down. However, for the first time last year, it seems like this is indeed no more than a tale, just a story. Book sales are on the rise. In 2016, Waterstones made its first profit since the 2008 financial crisis. And it has only gotten better since!
‘The only way books survive - whether published a month, a year or a decade ago - is if we talk about them. Keep passing the recommendations and why a book meant something to you.
#SaturdayMotivation’
At The Butterfly Effect and together with our ‘Fiction Partner in crime’ David Fell, we felt the passion to share why fiction is important and give you examples of this. Every other Friday we aim to share a quote, a passage, or something else from a piece of fiction - #FictionFriday.
So, why is fiction important?
For us the answer is very simple: it just is. Of course we realise that this is a very unsatisfactory answer. In addition to fiction creating a way for you to relax, to dive into another reality, and learn about new things, research has shown that people’s empathy increases when reading fiction. All good things. Imaginary worlds are given to you also through movies, but there the characters, settings, etc. are spelled out. While reading, you, the reader, contribute to the story, as no book will have fully been spelled out for you. The interaction between the book and the reader can be a very meaningful and very personal one. The take-away that the reader gets from the book, is not necessarily aligned with what the author intended.
Therefore, we believe that fiction helps you to dream, which might stimulate you to dream big and think outside the box. This could result in exploring new solutions to challenges you are faced with, or at least allow you to remain hopeful regarding big issues. Reading fiction also creates calm, something very powerful in this world full of information (an overload one may say).
Authors are able to draw attention to certain things in society that either need changing or things that they believe need highlighting. In the 1700s people started writing about everyday things and everyday society, resulting in the novel. (What we now call one of the first novels, Robinson Crusoe, was published in 1719). Throughout the centuries since, we have seen that, notably in the last century, and especially in turbulent times, people connect through fiction. In a lecture given at Birkbeck University last year, Mohsin Hamid said he often doesn’t name places, so his readers can fill in where the story is taking place, connecting it to themselves. But it also works in a different way. Picking up a book that takes place somewhere entirely different connects the reader to that place and the people there.
‘If words make worlds, then we urgently need to tell a new story about the climate crisis.’ However, to not immediately share the importance of a doomsday scenario in a work of fiction (more on that another time), today we offer these two quotations that will hopefully spark your interest to pick up a book:
‘Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done.’
Naomi Alderman, The Power
‘The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.’
Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature
Every other Friday, as part of our #FictionFriday project, we will send an email that we hope might intrigue you. These emails will be on the alternate Fridays to Inge's blog posts. Enjoy! David, Chiara and Inge.