Introduction
Books play one of the most essential roles in our lives. The fact is that most people are grown with books, and from early childhood, we start living with our favorite characters. We sympathize with the positive characters and hate the negative. We undergo all the challenges and adventures, we study to be patient, purposeful, sympathetic as these are the features of any noble character. It does not matter if it is a knight, an Indian with an eagle feather, or a street scamp: the actions and deeds will be noble.
Main body
Further, we start reading scientific books: history, physics, maths, biology; or business literature: management, marketing, advertisement, and so on. The scientific literature teaches us the rules of life, but most will not be met, and most knowledge will not be used in our everyday life.
Actually, we can not get to know everything from TV and the media. World Wide Web offers whales of knowledge, but anyway, these are the books. Moreover, most people prefer reading hard books, but not electronic copies, as the atmosphere of books is felt much better, especially if it is art literature. To my mind it is absolutely useless to argue what books play a larger role in our lives: we can not deal without both art and science literature. Science is aimed to improve our professional knowledge and skills, while art literature helps us to get absorbed by the adventures of a protagonist.
It is claimed, that science and technology cannot have an amalgamating role, just because of the unlimited amount of the gained knowledge and the speed of its development, which have been outlined in different specializations. But literature has always been one of the general indicators of human experience through which people may communicate with each other, no matter how various their occupations, their lifeways, their national and cultural features, their personal situation. It has enabled persons, in all the particularities of their lives, to transcend history: readers of some particular writer clearly realize the thoughts of each other across space and time, and people feel themselves to be partakers of the same species as, in the books by these writers, people study the origin and nature of what is called the human beings, what stays common in all of us under the broad variety of differences that split us. Nothing better prevents humanity from the foolishness of prejudice, racial discrimination, religious or political segregation, and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that always appears in great literature. It teaches us that men and women of all nationalities and countries are fundamentally equivalent and that only unfairness sows among them prejudice, fear, and exploitation.
Conclusion
As it has been already stating, the discussion, what books play a larger role in our lives is useless. Everything depends on the particular situation, and momentary requirement or desire of a human. The balance of art literature and scientific one should be balanced and harmonized, as everything in this world. Only then these disputes would become insignificant.
Reference
From Vargas Liosa, Mario. Why Literature? The New Republic, 2001.