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Comment by ErrantX | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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