It's good to read novels they say. We hear that it can cure ignorance, create new perspectives and stimulate fantasy. Probably there is some truth in this, but I do think there is another side of the story as well. 

 

Facts are confused with imagination
Everybody knows that a novel usually is a product of fantasy. Despite this, many authors can put almost anything on print and many readers will believe most of it. This probably won't happen with books that are so far from reality that confusions probably couldn't be made. It's not that people will believe that there actually is a school where they play Quidditch and learn magic spells after having read Harry Potter. 

 

This is more of a problem when considering stories that describe situations that sound realistic but doesn't have to be. Consider for example a book that takes place in the perhaps African country A. There could have been stories about conflicts, social problems or social welfare, companies, the political system, the people, the culture, wealth and basically anything that can occur in a geographical area. 

Now, did anybody fact check the content in the book? Almost nobody did? Why? Because it's a fictive story some might say, and therefore there is no need for it. Or maybe because people believed the author? Because he is from that African country, what he says must be true, or? 

I think this is something very, very dangerous. An author can put anything in a book, as it's fiction. Nobody will sue the author or remark that this is or that isn't correct, because it's still fiction. Yet the fictive book about the african country A will still be considered as something educative and mind-opening. I doesn't have to be that there are complete lies in the book. It's enough that the author does cherry picking of facts and makes subtle exagerrations to distort the image as a whole for artistic purposes. And this is the essence of it all; after all the goal for most authors isn't to reproduce accurate facts but rather to sell a story. 

So called important people sit in the TV sofas and say that these books are enlightening this, educative that. It could be the case, but it could as likely be that they help distributing distorted images of the world. I believe that the level of accurate facts and accurate descrpitions in a book, too often are confused the artistic beauty of the text. How can something that could be, and per definition likely is, completely made up, be called mind-opening without a thorough check?

 

Any novel about the african country A or the alike that isn't verified or questioned in any way doesn't  deserve any more attention as educative than Star Trek or some other complete fiction. Or maybe Star Trek is even better as it's so far from our current reality that it couldn't be confused with facts about our real world.  

How many fictional depictions haven't slowly ciphered into the people minds as facts during the years without any real questioning whatsoever?

I think books can be great. Depictions of fictional characters on a personal probably wouldn't pose any problem. But descriptions of society at level above the individualin the real world, will change what people actually believe about it.  

So perhaps you aren't really expading your knowledge about the world when youre reading that book, but are rather imprinting a false and distorted picture of reality. You really can't know without really digging in to what is said in the book, and perhaps that woudn't be enough neither. Ever thought about that before? I believe many fictional books that are claimed to depict our world are held far too high by our society as educative without being questioned enough first.