Quote:
Originally Posted by faithbw
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But who's to say that reading Dickens or Rushdie will make you a better person or increase your knowledge (which also begs the question "knowledge of what?")? How will I become a better person by reading The Satanic Verses or Little Dorrit? Maybe reading those works will make you a better reader in the sense that you will more than likely be exposed to different vocabulary, sentence structure, etc. Still, there is the chance you'll read Dickens and want to throw the book at the wall when you're done (yes, I really felt that way when I finished Great Expectations).
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To answer your first question literally, you and I - each individual reader - is to say. Little Dorrit may edify you, but not me. If not, that's my bad luck. I'll take the chance (I'm a daredevil that way).
At the risk of being a tease, David Copperfield is one Dickens novel that I'm sure did make me a better person, but we don't know each other well enough for me to tell you exactly how.
And I'm still not a good enough person to resist the linguistic nitpick - it
raises the question, it doesn't
beg it.
