过年前整理电脑的文件夹，发现一张多年前随手拍的照片。
到今年七月，我移居新加坡整整二十年。在这不算短的岁月里，我唯一一次看到有人在地铁上看书，而且还是个小孩子。他低垂着头，完全沉浸在那本厚厚的书里，看样子可能是一本小说。我忍不住拿起手机，拍下了这难得的画面。
车厢在轨道上晃动，隆隆作响。他的右腿叠在左腿上，膝头的书似乎不容易被他小小的右手手指和掌心稳住。身后窗外透进来的光落在书面上，密密麻麻的英文字。像是被吸进了那本书的世界里，只有在翻页的时候，他的身体才稍微动了一下。
这个姿势我太熟悉了。
曾几何时，我几乎忘了在公共场所那屏蔽周遭，乐在其中的感觉。
现在网路搜索还带着 AI 模式，找一本书，AI 直接总结书的内容。比如你查《红楼梦》，AI告诉你：“原名《石头记》，是中国古典四大名著之首，由清代作家曹雪芹所著。该书以贾、史、王、薛四大家族的兴衰为背景，通过贾宝玉、林黛玉与薛宝钗的爱情婚姻悲剧，展现了封建社会末期的社会全景及其走向灭亡的必然趋势。” 你看了这段总结，简明扼要，头头是道，比维基百科还快让你理解，于是你会觉得自己已经看完了整本《红楼梦》了吗？“展现了封建社会末期的社会全景及其走向灭亡的必然趋势。” 这是曹雪芹写《红楼梦》的初衷吗？还是 AI 大语言模型集合了一些人的共同看法？抑或是，这只不过是 AI 随机排列组合生成出的一段话？
这就触及了一个根本的问题：看书，究竟是为了什么？
如果看书只是为了"获取书中的信息"，对于结构固定、有标准答案的书，用 AI 来为我们总结的确效率高。但与此同时，直接从 AI 获取书中的信息，也剥夺了我们看书的乐趣。
看书不只是资讯/知识的视觉输入，无论是电子书还是纸本书，和听音频、看视频很大的不同，是输入过程的掌控感。音频的旋律节奏和视频的影像转接都是制作者先规划或计算好的。即使我们倍速快转或放慢，我们接收的，还是原来结构的压缩或拉长，还是在既有的框架中。看书呢？我们可以匆匆翻阅；可以细细品味，让脑海浮现的反应带动我们感受书的内容。
书是什么？书是用语言或图像搭建成可以进入的时空。看书，是用自己的脚步和节奏进入那个时空。在那里，看见自己此生未必能亲眼看见的风景；想象自己未必能亲身经历的人生。在那里，和超越边际的思维碰撞;和生命底层的情感共鸣。走一走，看一看，然后带着什么东西——或许说不清是什么——走出来。
现实不会马上改变，然而书也许滴水穿石，渐渐渗透进我们的记忆，让我们因为认同而转换观看的视角。英语有句话说：“You are
what you eat” ，意思是：你吃什么就会影响你的身体健康。我们也可以说：“You are
what you read。” 你读什么书，就会塑造你成为怎样的人。那么，也许你会反问：如果我根本不看书，难道我就不能说是一个完整的人吗？书籍出版比互联网和 AI 还滞后呢。
我无意把看书这件事情当成多么崇高、了不起的行为。看书与否，是每个人的自由选择。我想表达的是：看书是试错成本很低的一种“投资”。在信息爆炸的当下，我们不一定要大量阅读很多书，而是要知道：除了五音五色、除了被动接受，我们可以搭配互联网和 AI，协助找到陪伴我们独处时随便翻一翻就会觉得心安的那本书。
地铁上的那个孩子，我不知道他在读的哪一本书。但我记得他翻页的动作：很慢，像是舍不得，又像是在给自己一点时间，让刚刚读过的字，再多停留一会儿。
那个动作里，有某种无法被总结的东西。
2026年2月28日新加坡《联合早报》”上善若水”专栏
AI can summarize everything—do we no longer need to read books?
I Lo-fen
Before the Lunar New Year, while organizing the folders on my computer,
I came across a photo I had taken casually many years ago.
By this July, it will have been exactly twenty years since I moved to
Singapore. In these not-so-short years, I have seen someone reading a book on
the MRT only once—and it was a child. He lowered his head, completely immersed
in a thick book that looked like a novel. I couldn’t resist taking out my phone
to capture that rare scene.
The carriage swayed and rumbled along the tracks. His right leg rested
over his left. The book on his knee did not seem easy to steady with the small
fingers and palm of his right hand. Light from the window behind him fell onto
the pages, dense with English words. He seemed to be drawn into the world of
the book; only when he turned a page did his body move slightly.
That posture felt so familiar to me.
There was a time when I had almost forgotten the feeling of shutting out
the surroundings in a public place and losing myself in a book.
Today, even online searches come with an AI mode. When you look up a
book, AI immediately summarizes its content. For example, if you search for Dream
of the Red Chamber, AI will tell you: “Originally titled The Story of
the Stone, it is the foremost of China’s Four Great Classical Novels,
written by the Qing dynasty author Cao Xueqin. Against the backdrop of the rise
and fall of the Jia, Shi, Wang, and Xue families, the novel portrays the tragic
love and marriage of Jia Baoyu, Lin Daiyu, and Xue Baochai, presenting a
panoramic view of late feudal society and its inevitable decline.”
The summary is concise and well organized—faster than Wikipedia in
helping you grasp the gist. After reading it, would you feel as if you had
finished the entire novel? “Presenting a panoramic view of late feudal society
and its inevitable decline.” Was that truly Cao Xueqin’s original intention in
writing the novel? Or is it a synthesis of commonly held views gathered by a
large language model? Or perhaps it is simply a passage generated through
probabilistic arrangement?
This brings us to a fundamental question: what, exactly, do we read for?
If reading is merely about “obtaining information,” then for books with
fixed structures and standard answers, AI summaries are indeed efficient. Yet
obtaining information directly from AI also deprives us of the pleasure of
reading.
Reading is not simply the visual intake of information or knowledge.
Whether an e-book or a printed book, reading differs greatly from listening to
audio or watching video. In audio, melody and rhythm are prearranged by the
creator; in video, transitions are calculated in advance. Even if we speed up
or slow down playback, we are still receiving a compressed or stretched version
of an already fixed structure.
But with a book? We can skim quickly; we can savor slowly, allowing the
responses arising in our minds to guide how we experience the text.
What is a book? A book is a time and space constructed through language
or images—one that we can enter. Reading is stepping into that time and space
at our own pace. There, we see landscapes we may never witness in this
lifetime; we imagine lives we may never personally experience. There, we
collide with thoughts that transcend boundaries; we resonate with emotions at
the deepest layers of life. We walk through, look around, and come out carrying
something—perhaps something we cannot quite name.
Reality does not change overnight. Yet books may work like water
dripping through stone, gradually permeating memory and shifting our
perspective through identification. There is an English saying: “You are what
you eat,” meaning that what you consume shapes your physical health. We might
also say: “You are what you read.” What you read shapes the kind of person you
become.
Perhaps you would counter: if I do not read books at all, can I not
still be a complete person? After all, publishing seems slower than the
internet and AI.
I do not intend to present reading as something lofty or noble. Whether
to read is a personal choice. What I wish to say is this: reading is a form of
investment with a very low cost of trial and error. In an age of information
overload, we do not necessarily need to read a large number of books. Rather,
we need to know that beyond the constant noise and passive consumption, we can
use the internet and AI to help us find that one book we can flip through in
solitude and feel at peace.
I do not know which book the child on the MRT was reading. But I
remember the way he turned the page—slowly, as if reluctant, as if giving
himself a little more time for the words he had just read to linger a while
longer.
In that gesture, there was something that cannot be summarized.
February 28, 2026
“Shang Shan Ruo Shui” Column, Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore
