Why I read fiction | Hacker News Reader

Why I read fiction

pathdependent.com

35 pointschasingsparks38 comments

This is ironic timing for me. For more than five years I haven't read a single fiction book. Recently, I saw more than a few articles on being well-read and they all offered convincing arguments. I also enjoy how this linked article points to the positive social factors related to fiction. This was an area I found myself lacking and after being further convinced that reading fiction: the art of being deeply immersed in a book's story, often relating to or putting one's self in the situation, can reduce stress - I decided to make a change.

Recently, driving by the local library, my wife asks "what are you getting?", to which I replied, "I think it's time I start getting back in touch with the classics." I quickly picked up and read Of Mice and Men and The Pearl. I never knew how good these books were, books that I once read in high school and at the time never understood and ultimately despised having to read. My next read from the late Steinbeck will be Grapes of Wrath.

Lately though, I've been addicted to Vince Flynn's political thriller novels, and having never read Clancy, some critics say he's a Clancy protege. Flynn's books are incredibly difficult to put down, in my opinion.

Today, I'm about 60/40 for non-fiction/fiction reading and I find myself happier in general. Sometimes at least for me, always reading non-fiction can get kind of bland. Reading fiction a waste of time? Unless it's someone's only form of reading, I wholeheartedly disagree and I'm glad I got back into them.

This is just idle speculation, but I think people get turned off to fiction because they were forced to read classics in high school. Classics in high school are mostly useless unless you are particularly mature; I was not.

Rereading those books now is a bizarre experience. I remember reading Death of a Salesman a year back in a state of disbelief. It was something I remember absolutely hating in high school but six years later, I thought it was brilliant.

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 one I always find so frustrating. It's amazing the amount of information you can pick up from a good fiction book - and I have no specific data to prove this but I believe it is easier to retain such information.

Obviously fiction does include made up stuff; but some of the best fiction is actually well researched. Some examples:

- Dan Brown novels are full of real history, geography and so forth.

- Swiss Family Robinson has lots of natural history (one of my favourite books actually)

- Tom Clancy novels will teach you an awful lot about the military and military hardware etc.

It might not be specialist information, but it's amazing what you can learn from fiction :) Avoiding fiction because you can't learn anything from it is, well, a bit short sighted.

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.

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.

Counterexample: if you know anything about cryptography -- anything at all -- then Dan Brown's earlier book Digital Fortress is downright painful.

Digital Fortress is so awful, I couldn't even get through the first 10 pages.

Err yeh. In retrospect Dan brown isn't as good an example as I'd hoped :-)

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.

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. :)

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 :)

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.

"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.

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.

" 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."

The value in people like DFW may be like that of the Velvet Underground. They may have had a small audience, but they end up influencing the direction of the art form. (Brian Eno said that the VU may have only sold 10,000 albums, but everybody who bought one started a band.)

Wait, wait, what? This thread ... huh?

It's weird to see someone you think of as writing in a genre that kind of combines Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Nabokov with an almost fanatic pleading for empathy and communion -- described as someone who writes puzzles and brain teasers!

He wrote great stuff about addiction, entertainment, alienation, human communication, depression; stuff that to at least one withdrawn academic prone to sadness and anxiety was enormously powerful and redemptive and transformative.

He was a cerebral guy, he studied formal logic and math; that doesn't make him nonhuman! Is language not a valid, "people" thing to write about? People do have "trouble communicating," people are affected by the culture of television, even "postmodernism" and "irony" and "solipsism" are relevant in a deep, basic human sense for lots of (confused, lost) people.

(Granted, his nonfiction pieces are what I like best -- every essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing is gold -- still, Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Infinite Jest are powerful books, though sometimes tragic on many levels.)

"It's weird to see someone you think of as writing in a genre that kind of combines Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Nabokov with an almost fanatic pleading for empathy and communion -- described as someone who writes puzzles and brain teasers!"

I didn't mean to characterize all of DFW as obtuse metafiction. But there's stuff in, for example, the Oblivion story collection, that is just, um, quirky, stories that focus on playing with ideas of character and narrative.

fair enough :)

> 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)

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.

Facts are not knowledge. For instance, I've seen "facts" about Henry VIII all my life but it wasn't until I watched The Tudors that I gained some context to appreciate how those facts work. The Tudors might not be completely accurate but it was engaging, and with that context in place I can fill in the gaps and replace the erroneous facts here and there in a meaningful way.

"The Tudors might not be completely accurate but it was engaging, and with that context in place I can fill in the gaps and replace the erroneous facts here and there in a meaningful way."

But how do you know which are the fake parts? This is one problem with Dan Brown. He'll present a bunch of stuff, some of which is true, some made up for the sake of plot. How do you tell the difference?

Yeh, definitely fiction is not to be considered factually conclusive or anything. But The Tudors was great for light information about Tudor life, The Da Vinci code was insightful in terms of classical history.

The idea is that if stuff sparks your interest you can always go read into it in more depth. Otherwise you have at least a baseline; I have absolutely no interest in the Tudors, really, but the TV series means I could at least try to have a worthwhile conversation with a Tudor history buff :)

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.

> 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 :)

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.

There is a thread going on concerning how to become "well read." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240262) This post is about why becoming "well read" is valuable. I wrote it yesterday, but another post unexpectedly got popular, so I didn't press the publish button then.

An interesting meta question: I wonder how much people "pick their moments" to submit around here. I tend to post links as I see them, but I've definitely noticed a difference in results. (Don't post very late at night EST, for example.)

'I wonder how much people "pick their moments" to submit around here'

I've started doing that. I've submitted items around midnight PST, and they get little traction. The same story from a different link from someone else that next morning or afternoon gets more attention. Could be the title, etc., but I really think it's the time of day.

A lot. I do mostly when I write something new or if I have something that is related to a meme of the day.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=615846

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175223

I'm interested by the gender split. The man reads only non-fiction, and the woman reads only fiction; the same is true for my parents. My dad doesn't read fiction because he thinks its useless, but rather because he just doesn't enjoy it very much.

Have others found this to be the case as well?

If you look into the demographics of book sales you'll find this difference is born out at large. I'd guess that it has more to do with the typical subject of matter of fiction than its fact quotient. Women are more interested in inter-personal relationships. I'd predict that science fiction is relatively more popular among men.

I (a guy) read a lot more fiction (because I'm usually reading a few books at once, and the ficton ones can be read faster), but my girlfriend mostly reads mostly non-fiction,because somehow she finds it more pleasant (apart from terry pratchett, apparently)

Both parents and my 2 brothers read fiction. I have not noticed that women enjoy fiction more.

My parents read both. Doesn't seem like a pattern.

I read about half and half when I am actually "reading" but most of my internet reading is nonfiction.

Might I recommend microfiction to the HN crowd. Sort-short stories (usually <2 pages) that are a great way to change your mental state into "fiction" mode without taking up lots of time (used on amazon for $0.01).

http://www.amazon.com/Sudden-Fiction-Continued-Short-Short-S...

http://www.amazon.com/Sudden-Fiction-American-Short-Short-St...

It seems to me that the interest in much of my reading is to see a mind observing and reflecting on the world, and that is why I find memoirists such as Alvin Kernan, Iris Origo, John Lukacs, and Richard Gabriel so much worth reading. Certainly that is much of the appeal of the novels of Austen, Trollope, Wharton, Stendahl.

It is my impression that women tend to read more fiction, men more non, and that can tell which sex stocked a bookshelf.

Well put! I'm a relatively avid reader of both fiction and non, but have always had trouble explaining to my boyfriend (who only reads non) what substance I get out of fiction. Reading this post definitely helped me better articulate my feelings about this.

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