Fiction is what is important in life

This weekend I reconnected in a brief and quite unexpected way with a friend in a facebook chat. As we were about to sign off he told me about these amazing lectures by Umberto Eco he had spent three days attending. They sound brilliant but you will have to have iTunes installed to listen to them. (I'm sort of trying to avoid doing that because one day we're going to install some open source version which never quite happens ... stupid really.)
Anyway it was a wonderful online chat about how essential fiction and reading is to life. It really energised me to think of the pleasure of reading good books (yes ok, and bad ones too of course). There's something about story, fictions, tales, poetry that helps to reconnect us with the truth of our own story. Fiction isn't just important it's essential to life. The times in my life when I have been most out of of sorts tend to be the times I haven't been reading.