Yes and no. On the one hand, yes, of course, because you have received the content and presumably gained all or most of the benefits that one gets by reading the book, such as the moral lessons, the aesthetic insights, the entertainment value, the psychological insights, etc. And remember that before printing presses, almost all knowledge and stories were transmitted orally. The only reason you could not claim to have read it is that you did not read it. And there are some differences between getting information by reading it and by hearing it and some advantages of each. In short, if someone is daft enough to complain that you didn't really read a book after you've spent hours listening to it, ask them if they'd make the same complaint to a blind person (or to someone who sat through Homer's telling of The Iliad or to someone who saw a Shakespeare play performed). And then ask them if they ever read the book...

Yes. Lots. That's the easy answer. The hard answer isexplaining how we could possibly learn anything true from a series offalse statements. One answer is that good works of fiction use falsestatements to describe deep truths about human nature, emotions,relationships, morality, and the meaning of life. They do so by creating a world of characters and events that does not actually exist but that shares enough common features with our world that we can learn from them. Most importantly, the fictions may share the deep (and general) truths about human nature, etc. with our world, and they may do so because the writer has a deep understanding of these truths. Fiction also explores the boundaries of the possible and teaches us to think about these possibilities. Philosophy often works in this way. By considering what is possible but not actual we learn something about our world and ourselves. Science fiction and philosophical thought experiments sometimes differ only in that the science...