I was reading an article today that referred to a series of books as "harmless fiction," which made me wonder what it is about fiction that people see as being so harmless? No, I'm not going to bash fiction because I absolutely love fiction *lol* I was just thinking about the "harmless fiction" tag, and whether or not that sort of thing can be really accurate. Personally, I think what we read can rub off on us, even if it doesn't make us anything like what the content of the book is about (or else with my teenage love of crime novels, I would have either ended up as Nancy Drew or a homicidal maniac).
Books can inspire us to see new things, understand new thoughts, explore brave new worlds where it's comfortable to confront scary ideas that are a part of this world, become sympathetic to others, discover more about human experience, lose ourselves in imagination, confront our own frailties and human short-falls (as well as mutations of character), things like that.
Fiction does have an influence on us, it's not a passive thing that doesn't interact with us at all, but we also bring our own readings to it. The whole reading process is a two-way thing. Or more than that, if you are influenced by the voices/thoughts of others about what you're reading. This is why we have "best-sellers" that are basically bollocks in terms of quality writing (Dan Brown, anyone?).
Oh well. My quote of the day is from Soren Kierkegaard: "People demand freedom of speech to compensate for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
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