5 ms·

I asked him why he only read non-fiction, and he suggested that fiction was a waste of his time — he read to learn, not for “mere” entertainment This theory is

• chasingsparks 17y ago
  Good point. I'm actually reading Count of Monte Cristo right now. (I would not recommend.) I think putting the French Revolution into context as the setting for a novel made me understand it more than I could otherwise.
• schwanksta 17y ago
  I agree with what you're trying to say, but your example of Dan Brown bothers the hell out of me. Partially because he's a hack writer, but mostly because his books are full of bullshit.
  • ErrantX 17y ago
    It highlights the potential danger of learning from fiction books; you have to watch out for the actual fiction :) However I think the Dan Brown books are a great example - you have to side step the made up crap particularly in the lost symbol. But his earlier books have a lot of excellently researched information.
    • riffraff 17y ago
      what earlier books? I lived in rome for about 20 years and trust me, "angels & daemons" is way far from 'researched' even at the obvious geographical details. Though I agree his works do have a lot of crumbs of informations to put someone on a long wikipedia spree :)
      • ErrantX 17y ago
        Hmm, yes, geographical was perhaps a bit of a stretch for Brown novels. But I did learn a lot about the Vatican, for example, from that novel.
    • sketerpot 17y ago
      Counterexample: if you know anything about cryptography -- anything at all -- then Dan Brown's earlier book Digital Fortress is downright painful.
      • trafficlight 17y ago
        Digital Fortress is so awful, I couldn't even get through the first 10 pages.
        • ErrantX 17y ago
          Err yeh. In retrospect Dan brown isn't as good an example as I'd hoped :-)
          • sketerpot 17y ago
            Try Robert Heinlein; I learned a lot from the books he wrote in the 1950s. And he actually cared about technical details, as far as the science of the time allowed; he spent hours calculating orbits just to get the timing in Space Cadet right.
    • vimalg2 17y ago
      Come to think of it, I read a lot of fiction and sub-consciously engage in filtering out the fictional content from the real-world facts in the text. I'm inclined to believe, that this has helped me become a better filter for the noise/B.S from the real-world too. :)
• jamesbritt 17y ago
  "It's amazing the amount of information you can pick up from a good fiction book " But that's not a compelling reason to read fiction; you'll get more facts from non-fiction. Fiction helps you learn how to think about the world. It provides artificial situations for practicing empathy, moral reasoning, character assessment[0]. It exercises your imagination. It presents not just what is, but what may be. (Yes, non-fiction often has "but what does the future hold?" conjecture. Fiction offers this on a much grander scale.) Deriding fiction because it's not "real" is like dismissing sports because they're contrived competitions (e.g., they're not war or whatever sports may stand in for). [0] Some more modern fiction seems to be less about life and people and more about language and writing. Some works by David Foster Wallace come to mind. In that case, the fiction works more like puzzles or brain teasers.
  • ErrantX 17y ago
    > But that's not a compelling reason to read fiction; you'll get more facts from non-fiction. I only touched on it but I think one compelling reason is that it is easier to digest the information within the context of fiction. Kind of like historical culture is often easier to learn within the context of classical fiction (I agree with the rest of what you had to say)
    • jamesbritt 17y ago
      I got back to reading The Invention of Air, which, so far, is presenting all sorts of historical info in a compelling narrative. It's non-fiction but has the (good) qualities of a novel. A ripping yarn, you might say. There's little chance I could read some dry recitation of facts about that same topic. The story and thread-weaving is key.
  • mtts 17y ago
    Some more modern fiction seems to be less about life and people and more about language and writing. Some works by David Foster Wallace come to mind. In that case, the fiction works more like puzzles or brain teasers. Which we (as a culture, not we personally) don't read that stuff. I happen to like DFW, but I'll be the first to admit that it has little to offer beyond, as you put it, puzzles or brain teasers.
• mtts 17y ago
  But fiction is not about "real history, geography and so forth", nor about "natural history" nor about "the military and military hardware etc". It's about human nature in general. Which is the reason why Jane Austen is still worth reading even though none of us are, in this day and age, clergyman's daughters and why Dickens has written soap operas with ink black characters that still guide our moral compass today. Or why my favorite writer Kafka is the only truly worthwhile teacher on how to laugh at your pointy haired boss.
  • ErrantX 17y ago
    > It's about human nature in general. It is indeed; but it's not exclusively about that! > But fiction is not about "real history, geography and so forth", nor about "natural history" nor about "the military and military hardware etc". Actually, it is full of things like this - human nature is the story set within such context. Dickens is worth reading for the morality; but also lots of information on Victorian life. It might not be something you notice picking up (and not why the book was written) but I'm betting readers of Dickens will be able to recall all sorts of facts about those times. Fiction is often full of facts :)