Quote:

How superbly you spread the conventional wisdom, Alex Williams. Even I wish your nice romantic sentiment to be bounded by hard fact. But alas, Alex, you lose. Two minutes and sixteen seconds from now you will experience a beautiful moment of "Ah HA!". You can't help it; you are intellecually honest.

...Living vicariously is learning. Each romantic novel is different from its ten thousand brothers.



How nice of you to indulge my quaint, conventional thinking so patiently.

You have presented an argument that learning is one component of literature, even in the broader form of living vicariously through a novel's characters. You support your argument by making a comparison to children at play. However you do not successfully show that learning is all that a book contains.

I'm not saying that learning has no place in the appeal of books, and in fact I agree wholeheartedly that one learns a lot by living vicariously through fictional characters, but I don't think that is the only source of pleasure or quality in a book. There are elements of style (to borrow a phrase) that are particular to the art itself that may not convey any bit of information. A writer who has mastered the technical aspects of writing so they can write with a strong, clear voice is superior to one who has not. A piece of writing may convey the same information as another, but it is typically much more of a pleasure to read one written by Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain or Jane Austen than one written by Tom Clancy, Jeff Foxworthy or Jessica Trapp.