A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin
“A reader lives a thousand lives before they die. The person who never reads lives only one. Every time you open a book, you step into someone else’s world, walk in someone else’s shoes, feel their joys and suffer their pains. Reading allows you to see through the eyes of people you will never meet and be in times and places you will never visit. It gives you empathy, knowledge, and the freedom to explore countless possibilities without leaving your chair. That is the true magic of books: they let us experience life beyond our own.”
On Saturday afternoon, some of us were lucky enough to hear an excellent talk by Old Bromsgrovian and award-winning Financial Times journalist, Caroline Binham. She spoke warmly of her time at School and of being a member of Mary Windsor, recalling the group of lifelong friends she made and still sees regularly, almost 30 years after leaving. She also mentioned a number of teachers she remembers with great affection because she knows, looking back, what good care they took of her — and on the vital importance of learning foreign languages, which she believes enable us to connect with and understand others in ways that Google Translate can never replace. At the Financial Times, she commented, as in many organisations, those who can speak another language are particularly highly regarded.
Caroline Binham also spoke about AI, which as we know, is likely to have an impact on so many different areas. As an editor overseeing the work of other journalists and approving what they submit for publication, she said that while AI is currently useful for analysing data, it is not yet ready to write articles for a newspaper where the motto is “Without fear and without favour.” The media is not perfect, she said, but a commitment to impartiality—and to going back to original sources—remains essential.
As a teenager, if I wanted to research a topic, I would often go to a library, comb through the shelves and then through the index of a book or journal. Google made all that so much easier and faster when it became available in 1998 and it is thought that there are about 15 billion Google searches a day. Just a couple of years ago, AI became integrated into Google searches and as we know, while Google searches will often pull up a variety of sources relating to the topic we want, AI will summarise them.
But will AI replace books? Well, it is dangerous to make predictions, but my hunch—for now at least—is that it won’t, even if AI changes how we use them. AI can be a powerful tool to help us access, understand, and explore information more quickly, and I suspect that few of us have flipped through the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica recently. However, books that have been carefully written, checked, and edited provide depth, context, and nuance that AI summaries often lack.
It is relatively easy to find all sorts of data suggesting that reading books is good for us—and indeed, AI can help find such data:
However, none of that is really the point—and the point is captured in the passage that Antoine read to us. Yes, reading gives us better, more reliable information; it strengthens our concentration, expands our vocabulary, and helps us write more effectively. But most importantly, reading transports us into lives, cultures, and viewpoints that different from our own. It challenges us to imagine other people and other circumstances—something a machine-generated summary simply cannot achieve…at least yet.
As someone once said: “A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
But more than that still, in a time when we are surrounded by constant digital distractions—messages, alerts, and endless updates—losing ourselves for a few minutes each day in a good book can and should be a real pleasure. So whatever genre of book you enjoy, keep reading—not because it’s good for us or makes us successful, but simply because it’s enjoyable, enriching, and, above all, because we can.