“Suppose someone says that from reading Anna Karenina
and Madame Bovary
, he or she learned something useful which they then applied to their own marriage(s), […] whereas someone else professes to have had no help at all from reading assorted novels by Anne Tyler, George Eliot, William Maxwell and Anita Brookner […]. Supposing all this, or some variant of it—are we then to say that the second someone’s reading has been a total waste of time?” See here how Norman Geras—in response to this piece by Alain de Botton in The Wall Street Journal—answers the question.
