I’m really loving your writings. This post really made me chew on my own motivations for constantly reading novels for almost all of my now sixty years of life. And when I got to your final point: “no novel—not even War and Peace—is as good as a truly great conversation”, I found myself in complete agreement with you.
Being morbidly shy most of my life, I’ve enjoyed tragically few truly great conversations. But those few were peak moments in my existence. They always made it feel obvious that human connection was the reason for existing.
Reading a really good novel, I think, is a reasonable substitute for a conversation, even if it feels a little one-sided.
Thank you for writing. You’re a pleasure to read.
Your sense of humor, and your occasional typos, convinced me early on that you are not letting an LLM do your writing for you. Someday AI may master human humor, but I think that may come last, right before Skynet goes live.