In Praise of Reading and Fiction

Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel lecture, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011, emphasizes the power of fiction to promote social and political action. "We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist,” he says. “Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life."