Bookish News

No, you aren’t blath­er­ing at all. And you’re cor­rect, of course, that it’s the read­ers’ respon­si­bil­i­ties to dis­cern what they are reading–whether it’s fic­tion, fact or a com­bi­na­tion of both. And it def­i­nitely is not the authors’ respon­si­bil­i­ties either that the reader takes for truth any­thing in a book that’s labeled fic­tion. I made sure to say in my orig­i­nal post that Dan Brown said him­self that The Da Vinci Code was a work of fic­tion. How­ever, the way it was pre­sented had many peo­ple absorb­ing much of the con­tents as truth. That’s not his fault really and I cer­tainly don’t con­done cen­sor­ship either, unless some­thing is pre­sented as fact and it’s clearly not, and depend­ing on the seri­ous­ness and the effects of such a statement.

In your first post you said that some peo­ple are eas­ily influ­enced by what they read (or hear) and I totally agree. They don’t stop to think, “Is this true or just hearsay?” It sounds good, it looks good; there­fore, it must be fact.

So, I really was just respond­ing to your orig­i­nal state­ment of : “Guess books influ­ence peo­ple more than we think, maybe?” My answer, short and sweet with­out the expla­na­tions, would be “yes.“

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Avid Reader:
Guess books influ­ence peo­ple more than we think, maybe? Heard about the reli­gious under­tones but still, it is fiction.

I belive that’s prob­a­bly more true than some of us believe. It’s usu­ally not that crit­i­cal in fic­tion, but some­times it can be, depend­ing on the way story is laid out and how the book is adver­tised. In your arti­cle fol­low­ing this one, you speak about “The DaVinci Code.” That was a book that mis­led a lot of peo­ple, because although it’s fic­tion and clas­si­fied as such and even the author says it is, many peo­ple took every­thing in that book as fact. And com­pletely fac­tual it was not. It was a made-up story, based on some actual facts, and that was it. But peo­ple quote from it all the time as though it were the sec­ond bible.

So, yes, books do influ­ence peo­ple, some­times whether they’re aware of it or not. It is a very pow­er­ful form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Why else would many incom­ing rebel gov­ern­ments destroy the books of that coun­try as one of the first items of business?

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Regard­ing Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Run­ner,” I’m not so sure it deserved to be among the chal­lenged books group. Per­son­ally, although the book has been extremely pop­u­lar, I much pre­ferred his sec­ond one, “A Thou­sand Splen­did Suns.” One day I’m going to attempt to re-read it. It was emo­tion­ally drain­ing, but so infor­ma­tive and vital for our times, espe­cially for women. We can­not ignore what went on else­where and really what still may be hap­pen­ing in other countries.

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