by Joe Miller
I recently finished reading “The Faith of Beasts,” the latest novel from James S.A. Corey. The novel is a very loose, science fiction retelling of the Book of Daniel. (There have been no lions thus far, the title of the book notwithstanding.)
I’d been looking forward to reading this book for almost two years. Corey is a fantastic storyteller, and I deliberately saved the book for a week in which I had more free time than usual.
And yet, at around the halfway point, I found myself on the verge of asking my AI to spoil the ending.
Luckily I refrained at the last minute. It was an odd moment.
I spend a good chunk of my day reading things. Some of that reading is utilitarian – I need to know things for a very specific purpose, and I read exactly enough to understand the topic and then move on to the next thing. I’m happy to take shortcuts there because the knowledge is the point.
And some of my reading is just for pleasure. “The Faith of Beasts” was my 53rd novel of 2026, almost all of which I read simply because I enjoy reading novels.
In that moment, I found myself treating a book I was reading for pleasure – a pleasure I’d been literally anticipating for years – the same way that I’d treat learning about karst or finding the unemployment rate for Pocahontas County.
There’s an anxiety that comes with not knowing. I feel it after I pitch a potential client for a new project. I feel it when I submit a story to a contest. I feel it when I submit a column and wonder if this is the one that will provoke an angry letter to the editor. I feel it when I book checkups with my physician.
I find myself muttering things like, “I don’t care what the answer is, I just want to know.”
Not knowing is uncomfortable.
I do a lot less not knowing than I used to. It was, I think, somewhere around Christmas 1986 that I received C.S. Lewis’ “Space Trilogy” for Christmas. The final book in the series draws on a number of Arthurian legends, ultimately revealing a still-living Merlin, who helps defeat the forces of evil.
I read the books (twice) over Christmas break and thought to myself, hey, I bet I’d get even more out of these if I knew more about King Arthur and company.
Ravenswood, West Virginia, is bigger than Marlinton, but it’s still a pretty small town. The nearest bookstore was a Walden Books (remember those?), which was located in the mall in Parkersburg, a good 45 minutes north.
The next time we made the trip, I headed straight for the bookstore and asked if they had a copy of “Le Morte d’Arthur,” the definitive collection of stories about the legendary king.
No, the manager said, but he could special order it, and he pulled out the catalog he used for ordering books. His eyes widened when he showed me the entry. One edition was available to order. It cost $120.
I was a 14-year-old kid with a paper route. That was almost as much money as I’d earn in a whole year.
I finally read “Le Morte d’Arthur” when I found a copy of it in the college library my freshman year.
Today’s teenage kid could go from curious about Arthur to reading the first volume on Project Gutenberg in about 20 seconds.
That’s a real, material improvement for our kids, one that goes some way toward leveling the playing field for kids born in places like small-town West Virginia.
But no change is entirely free from tradeoffs, and the flip side of instant access to knowledge is the temptation to scratch every intellectual itch.
For a lot of things, knowing is genuinely better than not knowing. But it’s not always true. Knowing closes off possibilities. It shifts the brain from imagining to recalling. Imagining is a glorious and wonderful thing.
The same technology that lets a kid from rural West Virginia instant access “Le Morte d’Arthur” can just as easily provide an on-demand summary of the book.
That was seductive enough to nearly catch me, despite my having the benefit of a lot of pre-smartphone years to build a habit of sitting with uncertainty.
How do we expect someone who hasn’t built those habits to resist?
