Life skills we’ve learned from reading fiction
Here’s a post from Book Riot: Unnecessary Life Skills We Learned from Reading
My favorite: how to escape from prison and gain revenge: The Count of Monte Christo.
Yeahhh, pretty sure this particular method could not be used to escape from a modern prison; unless, of course, your prison happens to be on an island where bodies are disposed of by being thrown into the sea. For a more useful twist on the same basic method, The Shawshank Redemption would probably do better: sewer crawl instead of burial at sea.
And for revenge, not sure the basic lesson: First find a huge buried treasure is all that practical for most of us.
Let me see, stuff I’ve learned from reading, hmm. Well, how to fix a unicorn’s broken horn. Got that one from The Magic and the Healing, mentioned in yesterday’s post. Plus how to treat gout in birds, same place; also of course gout in the eagle foot of a griffin.
Oh, here’s one: if you’re kidnapped, make a real try at getting away as soon as possible, don’t wait. That’s from that recent-ish Mercy Thompson novel, Silence Fallen, and also any number of mysteries. I expect it’s probably good advice, for a situation that is perhaps not super-likely to occur in my calm, boring life.
The enemy’s gate is down . . . wait, not likely to need that one. Unless you take it as “Think outside the box in combat,” which is still not likely to come in handy, but no doubt substantially more likely than zero-gravity combat.
Never go anywhere alone with a guy you don’t know that well if you’ve discovered a body in the prior week or so. That’s always a bad idea, especially if you’re a female business owner who bakes, and most especially if you are developing a romantic relationship with a cop. Every cozy mystery in the world makes this plain.
If your nearest-and-dearest is bitten by a zombie, you really need to just shoot them right then. Waiting won’t help anybody.
Never put an alien artifact on your head unless you’re perfectly certain you’ll be able to take it off again.
Always be nice to SecUnits and other such entities. Be nice in general when a SecUnit is present. You never know when you might need that SecUnit to jigger its governor module and save your life. …. I guess that if you generalize this one sufficiently broadly, it’s actually pretty good advice.
If an AI / alien / who knows what invites you to join the Synergis, make sure you concentrate on developing your lan as fast as possible. That one’s probably not as generalizable.
What’s a real-life or not-real-life tidbit of important advice you’ve picked up from reading fiction?
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