Overall Favorite Books of 2016
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6.
THE VIEW FROM THE CHEAP SEATS
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Neil Gaiman is
one of the most beloved storytellers of our time, unequaled at his singular
brand of darkly delightful fantasy. His long-awaited nonfiction
collection The
View from the Cheap Seats celebrates a different side of Gaiman. Here
stands a writer of firm conviction and porous curiosity, an idealist amid our
morass of cynicism who, in revealing who he is, reveals who we are and who we
can be if we only tried a little bit harder to wrest more goodness out of our
imperfect humanity. An evangelist for the righteous without a shred of our
culture’s pathological self-righteousness, Gaiman jolts us out of our
collective amnesia and reminds us again and again what matters: ideas over
ideologies, public libraries, the integrity of children’s inner lives, the
stories we choose to tell of why the world is the way it is, the moral
obligation to imagine better stories — and, oh, the sheer fun of it all.
mong the many gems in the collection, which
include Gaiman’s meditations on why
we read and the
power of cautionary questions, is a
particularly timely short piece titled “Credo,” in which Gaiman writes:
I believe that it is difficult to kill
an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast.
I believe that you can set your own ideas
against ideas you dislike. That you should be free to argue, explain, clarify,
debate, offend, insult, rage, mock, sing, dramatize, and deny.
I do not believe that burning, murdering,
exploding people, smashing their heads with rocks (to let the bad ideas out),
drowning them or even defeating them will work to contain ideas you do not
like. Ideas spring up where you do not expect them, like weeds, and are as
difficult to control.
I
believe that repressing ideas spreads ideas.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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