I had a foreign exchange student from Turkmenistan stay with my family in the US for a year and it was pretty interesting, he was able to slide into our culture pretty well, the biggest issue I remember actually came when he went back home and the government pretty much refused to let him leave the country again and treated him kind of like a potential threat. To be honest, I don’t really remember very much about Turkmenistan other than that, he didn’t talk too much on it.
This is like saying I refuse to go outside because this book on nature I have is good enough, the context you get by being in the actual world helps whatever you read have more context. I’m assuming your comment was in jest, but it gave me such a gutteral reaction that I had to say something.