Book reviews, speeches, essays and memoirs; Novels, movies, comics, music, games ... It covers everything. In this collection of essays, neil gaiman's identity often changes. He is both a creator and a critic, a bystander and a storyteller. Reading this book is like riding a roller coaster through a kaleidoscope. You never know what you will see in the next second and what perspective you will change in the next. Because it is all-encompassing, you can choose your favorite part to read. In this big book of nearly 600 pages, you can always find what you like. These more than 80 rooms are like more than 80 independent rooms. Behind every door, there is a fairy full of stories. They are very patient, very patient. So it doesn't matter if some content is not interesting now. These elves are in the page. When you knock on the door one day, sit down and talk to them.
Elves have their stories, and you have your opinions. A book is always created by the author and the reader, and you are what you see. What I see from this book is about reading, writing, and a little about dreams. People who write stories are good at hiding their ideas in stories for readers to explore. But you don't have to go to great lengths to read prose collections. The secret is repetition. Although this collection of essays is scattered, you can find neil gaiman's views from his repeated words.
"Read first, then read more stories. Reading makes you understand, and stories make you learn to imagine. "
Neil gaiman's excellent memory and humorous and straightforward language style make his views both attractive and convincing. Starting from his childhood memories, he talked to you in detail about how he chose novels and how he learned nutrition from other people's works. Explain from a child's point of view why childhood obsession stories will be boring when they grow up-of course, this does not mean that children's reading is worthless. Books read by children should not be over-screened by adults. We are all children, but we all forget the experience of reading from the perspective of children-except neil gaiman. In addition to frank writing and equal narrative perspective, neil gaiman is also very good at telling stories with examples. He will use the "Dutch tulip effect" to explain the investment frenzy in the golden age of comics, and he will also use pornographic literature to explain what genre novels are. Neil gaiman told the same idea from different angles on different occasions-to read, reading is not to scan the words on the book, but to understand others and make yourself understood; Read stories, cultivate empathy in other people's stories, and learn truth without personal experience; Imagine that everything in a fantasy story has another possibility. Even if this "possibility" becomes a reality, you have already thought about the countermeasures in the story.
The development of the real world proves neil gaiman's reading view-the views he expounded in his articles ten years ago and twenty years ago are outdated and surprisingly prophetic. The discussion on copyright in Fahrenheit 45 1 is still worth learning today. In the article "Good Comics and Tulips" by 1993, it is still sharp and thorough to replace comics with hot words such as the Internet and celebrity economy on the Internet.
Finally, things related to dreaming. Yang Dechang said that movies have tripled human life span. Neil gaiman said it's all about reading and imagination. Myths, cartoons, books, movies and TV plays, like compost, are mixed together in a dark and sticky way, which may wither or rot, but ultimately nourish our lives.
A table and a chair all come from the original imagination of human beings-what would happen if things were not put on the ground and what would happen if they were not sitting on a stone. We have entered the era of radio, television and Internet, but the power of reading and imagination has never declined. Ten thousand years ago, human beings created words through imagination, and now, human beings have moved towards a broader future through words. Dreaming, curiosity, exploration and fun, whether Homo sapiens 3 million years ago or human beings today, as long as we have imagination, we are all of the same kind. Because that little imagination is what really drives human beings to stand up and walk upright.