A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to product to risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book… A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume – something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it’s difficult to call books a ‘mass medium’. No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades.
….
These are the places that only books can go.
This is the advantage that books still have. This is why I write.
– The Guts Effect by Chuck Palahniuk
Found this amazing Essay by the author of Fight Club. The essay had me hooked as it explained a phenomenon that happened at the readings of a certain short story by Chuck Palahniuk. The phenomenon is covered in the Wikipedia article of the author:
