A lot of people read as a hobby and that is completely easy to understand.
But at least in my country we need to read fiction books in school and analyse them.
It’s important to know that I am talking about fiction, not about history or math books. I am talking about Shakespeare and those fiction writers.
As an example, we need to explain the meaning of verses in poems and we need to understand what is the meaning behind books.
Why we need to do this? Is the necessary nowadays?
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Literature, and fiction in particularl, is art reflecting life. It’s not just about telling an interesting story, it’s a way to explore certain real-life issues and questions. It’s questioning the status quo (the ‘it is what it is’ mentality) and the way things are. Books are a powerful mechanism to challenge authority and make people think critically about the world around them. They’re a blank slate where you can do *anything*, take an issue and explore it to it’s potential end game. Not all fiction is that, granted. Twilight doesn’t quite have the same quality as War and Peace.
In school, they walk you through how to pick up on those themes, how to think about them critically, how to connect those themes to what was happening at the time those books were written and figure out what the author was making a commentary on or challenging.
Unless you know what to look for, a fiction book can be passed off as ‘just a story’ when in fact it’s a scathing criticism of an oppressive regime. It’s a way to spread those ideas to many people under guise of a work of fiction. It’s one thing to publish an essay explicitly saying “this government sucks” and another to write a fictional novel that has some similarity but taken to an obvious extreme and explore how the society got there and how it affects the population. There is an argument that can be made that this is clearly a book of fiction and any similarity to real-world scenarios are purely coincidental or imagined.
There is a reason book banning is the first step of any oppressive government, and why many authors considered to be classical greats were persecuted by the governments of their time.
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