Do you read literature to learn more about reality, or to escape to another world?

[spookymulder93]

When I first started reading literature I was all about learning about what's considered to be reality but the older I get the farther away from reality I try to go.

I like novels that question what I've been conditioned to see as "normal" behavior.

[mayneverhave]

Neither necessarily.

I don't look for anything I read to mirror or conform to reality in any shape or form. I have no interest in whether literature accurately depicts reality, so I am not at all troubled by whether, for example, Hamlet displays a world which is similar to my own. I am not troubled by plays featuring ghosts (though I do not believe they exist), nor angels and devils (though I do not believe they exist).

That being said, I don't necessarily read as a means of a escape. Reading provides a certain kind of intellectual pleasure that could be considered akin to viewing a beautiful painting or listening to a well composed symphony.

[blazeofglory]

Both ends persuade me into reading books, novels and nonfictions. Through books I can read your minds and thoughts. I know books cannot disclose all you feel and think but it can if the reader is truthful to what he or she talks about say lots about human nature. There are many layers within us that remain deep-seated and we choose not to reveal even to our close associates and at times we become bold to share all we feel honestly and some people at great costs even at the cost of their lives.

Of course thru books I can enter into a different reality, a new hitherto undiscovered world, not necessarily a physical world; it can be a virtual world too

[MarkBastable]

The two things aren't mutually exclusive. In fact I'd argue that they're inseparable.

For instance, The Lord of the Rings was a represention of the real world as Tolkien saw it - the world he'd experienced in the blood and mud of the Great War, and the questions that had raised in him concerning humanity, evil and the struggle for balance and peace.

These are real world themes. Fantasy novels are not about trolls and Platform 13-and-a-halfs or Warp Speed spaceships or vampires at high school. Novelists write about the way they believe things are or they way they would like things to be, in the end. The goblins and the ray-guns and even the Bronx or the stockyards or the mansions in the Berkshires or the playing fields of Eton are just window-dressing.

[Seasider]

Sir Philip Sidney, an Elizabethan poet, said that the purpose of poetry...and I think it may be applied to Literature of any kind is "to teach and to delight". So it isn't an either/or situation. And the best of literature will do both.

[Kyriakos]

I agree that good literature gives insights as to how other people viewed things. In the end you create the story yourself, in your mind, since what the author had in mind, and what you experience of the story, never correspond fully
For example i write stories which have psychological explanations for unussual behaviours and phenomena. But i've been told that my stories are supernatural. It is all in how you look at it, in the end.

PErsonally nowdays i read a story so as to live in another world, the closed world of another person's creation, and what of his/her psyche was projected into it.

[JBI]

Neither. Literature is neither mirror or garden - it is neither rhetoric nor emotion - it generally is more of a conversation about itself. The best literature generally tends to not be about politics, but rather about itself as literature.

That's the strength behind Shakespeare - behind all of his plays is the metaphor of the stage - and, quite literally, a stage - they acknowledge that, and therefore function in creating their own worlds by pushing the possibilities - humanism, for instance, discusses humanity as something it constructs - it is neither escape nor realism, but rather, an intellectual ploy - discussing what it would mean to be human under a set of parameters.

The question isn't about turning inward or looking outward, but more of a game of wits, questioning the creative capacity of the artist in how they handle the tradition and their own place in it. Realism or illusion are both just parts of the game.

[mal4mac]

Reading provides a certain kind of intellectual pleasure that could be considered akin to viewing a beautiful painting or listening to a well composed symphony.

Not *all* reading does this, or aims to do this. When I read my A-Z I don't expect (or get) any direct pleasure. I just *indeed* learn more about reality.

When reading literature I mostly hope for pleasure, but sometimes I want to stretch myself and know that pleasure is not necessarily going to occur - I thought my recent attempts at reading Ulysses and the Bible would yield more pain than pleasure. I was right! (Too much pain in fact, so I stopped.)

[Heteronym]

Yes, well, let's make a distinction between reading literature (which is part of something greater known as fiction) and reading guides, manuals, train time tables, etc.

I read to get in contact with new modes of reality and appreciate different, subtler nuances of the human condition that sometimes I can't appreciate in everyday life. I read to confirm certain things I think I know about Mankind, but also to be surprised by the new things writers reveal about it. And, if possible, I like to do while reading a novel that's funny and delightful to read too

[nandakishore]

In my opinion, we can never experience reality, only the internal picture of it that we form through the data filtered in through our senses. Even if we assume that this is a good approximation of external reality, it is quite possible that we are living in a world similar to that of "The Matrix" and "Vanilla Sky". Our view of reality is coloured by our minds, our selves.

Good literature takes us beyond these sensory data, by using language, our everyday medium of communication, in unusual ways. We experience reality as it can never be experienced by our senses.

[miyako73]

To learn how a certain writer views an object, a person, an event, or even an insect-- like the ants of Marquez.

[Scheherazade]

I usually read to be able to say that I have read them... And throw them into conversation casually: "Oh, that reminds me of Thomas Hardy's Tess" or "You sound just like a character out of a John Osborne play!"

People try very hard not to show it but I know they are jealous.

[spookymulder93]

I usually read to be able to say that I have read them... And throw them into conversation casually: "Oh, that reminds me of Thomas Hardy's Tess" or "You sound just like a character out of a John Osborne play!"

People try very hard not to show it but I know they are jealous.

That plays a part in some of the books I read. Especially the classics. It's like I want to see why so many people view them as classics.

[Heteronym]

I usually read to be able to say that I have read them... And throw them into conversation casually: "Oh, that reminds me of Thomas Hardy's Tess" or "You sound just like a character out of a John Osborne play!"

People try very hard not to show it but I know they are jealous.

Unfortunately, that only works if you're surrounded by people who care about reading in the first place. Otherwise they just shrug their shoulders, ignorant of my book references, and go on talking about

[LMK]

I agree with the distinction Heteronym offers between reading what one chooses verses reading what one must to get by (books, magazines vs. bus schedules, manuals).

Therefore, I would like to suggest to the OP that there are two responses; the first, is what one chooses to read, and for me that can vary from classic literature (ex, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Camus, Twain, Stevenson, Dickens) to action/adventure (ex, Vince Flynn, Baldacci) to non-fiction (Tuesdays with Morrie, The Lost City of Z), to something that catches my eye (The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Rumpole at the Bailey)

The second response is why I read, and I will admit that I do read to escape, not to a place, but from one. Hotel rooms, airplanes, waiting areas, sometimes even to get away from what I should be doing – writing. But, I also enjoy meeting new people, visiting new places and being introduced to human characteristics and reactions, situations that I might not have been exposed to otherwise.