A Writer at Large: Half in Praise of Reading ; the Gifts of Fiction Are Many - It Offers Sympathy and Understanding, It Can Introduce Us to People, Places and Cultures We'd Never Otherwise Encounter - but, Writes FRANCIS SPUFFORD, It Can Also Allow Us to Live in a World of Illusion, a Substitute for the Hard Work of Really Getting to Know Individual Human Beings

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One way and another, reading takes up so large a share of my existence that I have to praise it. It is what I know best, it is what I know how to do best, and the riches it brings me are always under my eye, undeniable. I know that the discoveries I make as I read are real and substantial, and so I insist that my switchback progress from left to right, left to right, left to right along lines of printed prose represents a genuine mode of experience, whose integrity I have to defend if I'm not to be untrue to the hours and years I've spent engaged in it.

This makes me, on an instinctive level, reading's advocate. I'm in favour of it for myself, and I'm in favour of it for …