“Serious novel-reading has become little more than a hobby.”

“We’ve had instead a collapse of the old reader-author agreement that novels are mandatory texts for the culturally literate.“.

I signed no such agreement, and I am an old reader. If there is a signature on file, I disavow it. Letting someone else control the narrative of your mind for the length of time it takes to read a novel, with the plausible deniability of it’s all just fictional, is just asking for trouble. People start living in the constructed reality of the novel in their mind in real life. The collective hunch of reality is strange enough on its own.