Reading Too Much Into Reading?

I just finished reading Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond. One of the collapsed societies he studies is the Norse colony on Greenland. He tells how these stubbornly Europeanized settlers eventually succumbed to starvation because they would learn nothing from the Island's native Inuit population, who lived rather well on fishing and hunting abundant seals and other aquatic mammals. The Norse settlers despised the Inuit, whom they referred to as 'skraelingar,' which means, more or less, 'wretches.' But the wretches thrived on traditional ways while the Norse eventually starved.
Just prior to that book I had read Mayflower: a Story of Courage, Community and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick. What a different story he tells, of how the English Pilgrims would never have made it through the first treacherous seasons on the rocky coast of Plymouth Colony, except that they adapted many ways of the native Americans they met. They learned from, traded with, socialized with, and drew up treaties and agreements with the peoples and their leaders, a process of assimilation that set the early colony -- and others that were to follow -- on a sound footing.
It was just a coincidence that I read these two books back to back. But the difference between the two historical incidents was immediately apparent to me, and put a satisfying spin on my last month's reading. This sort of synthesis, this sort of realization, is what I think I get from reading that I could not get from any other experience. When you read a book, as opposed to any other form of gathering information, you get time to think and reflect and put together your own thoughts, and then to form new thoughts and move on from there.
Perhaps that's why the cultures that developed print early on are the ones that became the greatest civilizations, or why religions based soundly on sacred writings endure as the most influential. Perhaps I'm reading too much into my own personal experience.
What do you think?