Reading literature has many benefits:

1 You read other people’s stories and learn from their experiences, almost as though you have lived several extra lives.

2 You learn about the customs, geography, and culture of different places and periods, broadening your knowledge.

3 You learn about different modes of production and occupations.

4 You learn about the inner worlds of different groups of people.

5 You learn different kinds of literary language, improving your expression and thereby your personal appeal.

6 You compare stories with real experiences and use each to verify the other. People who love reading therefore tend to be wiser in life and quicker to learn.

7 Reading is also entertainment. It relaxes you without much psychological burden.

8 Having witnessed many lives and ideas in books, you develop a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of society, with greater empathy and tolerance.

9 It improves imagination. We are always limited by our living environments, but literature lets us travel through different times and places.

An illustration combining a reader, books, a starry sky, and historical elements

Considering these benefits, we can infer that in the multimedia internet age, images and videos have replaced many functions of written words. As manga, films, and television have become popular, relatively few people read literature anymore, especially long classics.

Take Hugo’s Les Misérables. The original is painfully long-winded, with whole passages of tedious description and such complicated subplots and characters that you may forget them after reading for a while. Perhaps only in the era before mobile phones did so many people have the patience to finish it. The film, however, is much more enjoyable. In two or three hours, you understand the whole story, and it offers most of the benefits of reading literature listed above.

We therefore really cannot blame people today for reading fewer books. Nobody is foolish; people choose what benefits them. Films, long and short videos, WeChat official-account articles, and Zhihu posts can all be excellent reading material, sometimes achieving the same effect as a good book.

But most information on the internet is junk. For modern people, information has long been excessive. The more important question is how to find high-quality sources. One good source is worth several books.

Following my WeChat official account, for example, will always teach you new knowledge and skills and give you another perspective on the world, broadening your horizons: wow, so this is how someone else thinks about things!

I have done little to promote my account and have never even shared it on WeChat Moments. Yet many impressive people have found and followed it through different channels. They have judgment and foresight. History will prove that they made the right decision.