Is Reading Novels Useless?

I used to think that reading stories that are made up is something useless. I used to have a very strong opinion about this because I thought that our world would never be the same as the ones described in the fictional stories, we would never be able to learn or use anything from the story to apply to our own lives. However, my perception of reading fictional stories changed once I read Dune.

Dune is a science fiction series, and the reason why I started reading it is because after watching the second film (not the one made in the 1980s, but the one with Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya in it), I realized that the themes the author incorporated in his work is absolutely remarkable and is more than relevant to our world in reality. I then convinced my parents to buy me the series and I am now on the fourth book.

So what makes Dune and fictional stories so special? Personally, Dune is highly philosophical, making it extremely thought-provoking, and the type of vocabulary used and the explicit statements on life and living in conflict, targets precisely at global issues we encounter nowadays, such as desertification, climate change, the constant battle of resources, and so on. Statements that define why the world is chaotic and uncontrollable in many cases, quotes that analyzes the clear motives of why and how things are (even when they are deemed as moral), and words that implicitly describe the small but powerful movements and thoughts of characters, are what makes this series successful. 

In Children of Dune, Ghanima and Leto (the children of Paul Muad’Dib and Chani), did not limit and define their lives based on their origin from the royal status of their bloodline. They chose to redefine who they are and how the kingdom is meant to be for them, which is incredibly like how I am perceving my own life—my parents don’t explicitly tell me “you have to choose a major or a job that makes a lot of money” but they do implicitly communicate those ideas to me, so it is up to me to decide how I would like to shape my own future.

Reading novels may seem irrelevant to our everyday life, but the philosophies that it communicates, the morals that it tells us about our world, is what we may not experience or feel in our own lives. Thus, let’s open ourselves up towards more diverse perceptions of our world, and strengthen our own beliefs of humanity.