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Why Read?
Dante Muñoz May 2021
I’ve been wondering what makes reading so impactful, fiction or non-fiction. Compared with watching media in video format, why do people who read feel so strongly about it?
I think it’s because of how conceptual reading is. Words are the building blocks of thoughts. For example, consider how difficult it is to think about those feelings we don’t have words for.
So reading becomes a conceptual link between your mind and the author’s. While documentaries can provide evidence clearly and compellingly, the words of their narration and interviews are what frame that evidence conceptually.
A glitzy TV show can show you a powerful scene with a beautiful setting, costume design, and soundtrack. That level of stimulation can feel infinitely more compelling than words on a page, but an essay can explain why all of that felt so compelling to you.
Reading is what elevates us from programmable consumer masses being entertained by flashing screens to conscious creators and participants in society.
Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett (2008)
Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Haslett on his prescient novel he finished the week Lehman Brothers collapsed in the 2008 crash:
It’s a book not about the actual crash but the culture that lead to it. I spent 5 years wondering if anybody would think it mattered what banks did, but unfortunately history solved that problem.
The novel started out turning international financial scandals into entertaining satirical fiction then hit me with some of the darkest, most emotionally invasive gay sex scenes out of nowhere 😂
After reading a few of his novels, I really appreciate this trope he uses of a doomed revolutionary minded character who is chronically misunderstood.
Here are excerpts of each of the three main characters read with video elements:
Introduction to Dialectical Materialism by Luna Oi
Luna does a fantastic job of making these ideas as accessible as possible while giving some real world examples to consider.
Luna Oi interviews her Tankie dad, a Vietnamese Communist
Luna’s dad describes his training aid received by the USSR and how the Vietnamese paid the aid forward by helping their neighbors.
Strike – Summer Of Haze · CHERNOBURKV (2021)
This song (and the entire album, “48 x 84”) is a bombardment of witch house that shows us the emotional chaos 2021 will surely bring.
The industrial crashes and grating sounds underlying frantic yet confident female vocal tracks is the breath of fresh toxic air we need musically right now.
Former Socialism’s Faults – Hakim (2020)
This is a fantastic video that will give you not only an introduction to past socialist states but also good-faith criticisms of them. These examples will give you plenty of substantive topics to think about and talk about when you discuss Socialism with skeptics.