Are Books Really Not Worth Reading?

You must be fancying me mad after reading this title. How can a writer even entertain such a thought on the subject of books? Not to worry, I assure you all that this is not my thesis at all. This piece is actually a response to a rather well publicized event and an interesting piece of information that came from it.

I am sure that by this point you have heard the name Sam Bankman-Fried many times and wish you had not. This article is not about the merits and/or pitfalls of crypto though. That is beyond the scope of this humble blog. What I wanted to focus on instead was an interview he had given where he made a few rather disdainful remarks around books. "I would never read a book" was one. "I'm very skeptical of books" was another peach. And the coup de grace: "I think, if you wrote a book, you f****d up", and it should have been a six paragraph blog post". 

In this six paragraph blog post, I wish to remark that Fried is right in some instances. For example, many books will be written about the FTX saga and how people were bilked out of millions. Those should be six paragraph blog posts. Basically, a well-connected MIT graduate with a good sense of how to market his image exploited the greed and naivete of many thousands by selling them the proverbial oceanfront property in Kansas. Thinking better of it, six paragraphs could even be a couple of sentences and even this would give Fried more ink and more characters than what is prudent.

That detour aside, let us resume the discussion on books. Why do we write books? What do they achieve? We write for as many reasons as there are books in the world. We write to express ideas, to document our history, to interpret our history, to instruct, to cultivate imagination, create new worlds and so forth. These are not idle pursuits. We would probably not explore the seas the way we do if 20000 Leagues Under The Sea had never been written. Without War Of The Worlds we would most likely not be trying to find life on Mars. People learn to play chess through books. They learn about art and sports through books. They even learn about financial literacy so as to not fall victim to curly-haired con-men with squeaky voices and well-heeled political connections.

A book is an expression of love, a manifesto for a better tomorrow, a firepan in the woodpile of anger. The ideas that float through the mind sometimes cannot be distilled into a quick blog post. They require a book because they are the product of intense and complex thought and effort. Some things are simply not simple enough to be a six paragraph blog post. Wrestling with the struggles of life elicit too many profound thoughts for that. They also elicit interesting perspectives and allow people of disparate cultures, nationalities and languages to connect and find the commonalities with each other. Books are the bedrock of human creativity. Movies, songs, plays, inventions etc. have come from books. They are a testament to our shared humanity.

And books are one more thing. They are the object of fear. Every dictatorship in recent history it seems has a list of banned books. There is a reason for that. Books are vehicles for thought and vessels of freedom. When creating a book, you as a writer enjoy something that is about as close to perfect freedom as man can possibly taste. Thoughts are dangerous for dictatorships because they thrive on blind obedience which thrives in the absence of thought. Books are weapons of the war against human subjection. Books are the great emancipators of the human race.