Passively sitting down with the latest Dan Brown novel won't make you any better at reading or writing. Sitting down with a novel that's just beyond your comfort zone (say, Dostoevsky if you're used to Dan Brown) will make you better at reading, and sitting down with any novel and actively paying attention to how the writer shapes the story with words will make you better at writing. But that's an apples-to-sushi comparison: it takes a lot more mental effort to actively engage with a book than it does to passively sit in front of a TV. A more appropriate comparison would be actively reading vs. playing Starcraft, which gives you a bunch of essential skills, eg. multitasking, resource management, positioning & prioritization, etc.

Basically, you get out of any activity what you put into it. If you put zero effort into reading, you're going to get zero skill out of it.

Even if a novel is not very literary, I think it still stretches the readers mind because rarely do you engage with such a complex structure/abstraction.

> Passively sitting down with the latest Dan Brown novel won't make you any better at reading or writing. Well, I disagree. I think that any practice improves you, even if by a marginal amount. But I could be wrong, so let me rephrase that sentence as "reading serves as a practice for your reading and writing skills". I think it does not affect my point in the "reading is inherently better than TV" discussion.

> Basically, you get out of any activity what you put into it. I'm going to write this one down. Thanks.

The reading I did as a child was well beyond what other children my age were reading, but it never required "effort," because it was pleasurable.

It's a mistake to think that activities which require no effort are useless.

The most pleasurable things, in my experience, require great effort. You just don't notice because they're pleasurable.

We can thank Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for this idea. Flow is what you get when you intersect a properly challenging task with a properly adept skill-set, and it is immensely pleasurable.

That would be a good point if I were 8 years old.

However, my vocabulary is unlikely to increase anymore.

The brain gets lazy if you don't exercise it. Sure, you might be getting it from somewhere else, but reading is still a good source to as least practice your vocabulary.

I'm sure there are many words you have yet to discover, and they are still worth learning and using.

Ability to connect with strangers through mutual ties to 'pop culture'

Although it answers my question, you could say that any practice (maybe with the exception of breathing) gives you "mutual ties".