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Comment by xcambar | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to be totally subjective and please accspt I'm not being judgmental.

I have not read through all the list but by skimming, there's a really huge majority of nonfiction books.

I love nonfiction and I'm reading quite a lot myself, but I can't imagine to not have a novel or any fiction book to balance it out.

The lack of fiction in this list also makes it indigestible to me.

Why would you spare yourself from the epic,from the beautiful or from the tragic of a fiction book? This is beyond me, but this is just me as well, so thanks for sharing the list, I'll read some of these :)

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I wondered why someone would publish such a list, and happily there is a FAQ which answers that.

https://sive.rs/bfaq

Your comment was also addressed.

“Why don’t I see __(some book)___?”

I do read fiction, but I don’t take notes on it. For fiction, I prefer audiobook.

I also read hundreds of books before 2007, but didn’t start taking notes until I realized I was forgetting what I had read.

And ultimately, I only read things that apply to my life or current interests right now. I say no to all requests, and publishers asking me to do reviews.

Well “I do read fiction” and “I prefer audiobook” are mutually exclusive. Listening to someone reading a book is not reading a book.

Seems a bit like gatekeeping. Some people rely on audiobooks.

>Seems a bit like gatekeeping

So? This seems like a thought-stopping word: "Oh, gatekeeping! Awful". I'd say we could use some more gatekeeping.

>Some people rely on audiobooks

Well, if you mean the blind, or even people with no time outside car commuting, etc, well for them it's another matter.

I might rely on a walker to go around, but that doesn't mean that it's just an altertive for walking that I prefer, as opposed to a remedy for a health issue.

I think it’s reasonable to distinguish reading a book and listening to a book. I don’t particularly think one is better or worse, but certainly they are objectively different.

My sense is that when people talk about gate keeping there’s necessarily an emotional component. In this case I’d guess perhaps there’s a sense that “reading a book” is valuable or prestigious and they don’t want to exclude someone from it.

But to me it’s just an observation of how you consumed content, free of emotional charge.

I have an audiobook of my book, "Inventing the Future." You can see me and my narrator talking about it at [1]. I auditioned about 25 narrators before picking him.

If you have a lot of dialog, like I do, I think a narrator can bring it to life, by inhabiting the characters. If you're reading the book, you might well be imagining the author talking to you, so an audiobook narrator becomes the voice of the author.

So no, they're not mutually exclusive.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGchbES0DhU

That's like saying typing a book on a keyboard or dictating a book is not writing a book.

Not quite the case. Reading a book requires a focus on word and sentence structure, a level of attention, that listening to an audio recording doesn't really match. At the least reading requires basic literacy. Thus, listening and reading aren't the same. Writing by any means or dictating text on the other hand both make you have to focus on exactly how you say things in the clearest possible way. This makes them much more similar.

I read about 50ish books a year and all of them are non-fiction. It’s not because I look down on fiction but mostly because I can’t seem to finish any fiction book I ever pick up.

Just this year I tried to read Musashi, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and some classic Russian novels and I can’t do it. I’m not sure why and I’m well aware of the benefits. So to an extent I imagine Sivers is similar.

Not all books are written the same and I cant finish some fiction books either. But there’s some fiction that I read through very quickly

Same here. I can't even get through Dostevsky's The Double even knowing the story sounds amazing and it isn't that long.

I don't think the images play in my head as well as other people and that is not really an issue with non-fiction. With non-fiction I am just parsing the content in a sense.

I picked up a YA book (the skullduggery pleasant series) at my friend's house a while ago and read practically the whole thing. It was a nice fun easy read! I wasn't trying to widen my knowledge I was just reading that's my new trick to reading more non fiction! (That and stopping if I'm fed up!)

I'm probably the other extreme in that I read 40-60 fiction books a year, and only one or two non-fiction. I do read a lot of articles on various topics though. (Grateful for the integration of Pocket on my Kobo reader.)

silicon valley types wont read fiction cos they cant monetise that reading.

I agree and do read 3x more fiction than not but it is an interest axis to balance on. Like, how did it get to be that everyone is expected to read more fake stories than real ones?

The negative tense of the name “non-fiction” is interesting too. The original categorizers must also not have thought too highly of it.

> Like, how did it get to be that everyone is expected to read more fake stories than real ones?

Real stories have a tendency not to be as real as one might hope.

Fake stories have a way of being more real than the "fake" label might imply.

For a deeper example of this boundary, read "Startup" by Jerry Kaplan: the story of GO Corp.

He has these "conversations" between people 35 years ago, with wildly unrealistic dialog that no human would ever speak. And yet this qualifies as "non-fiction"?

Having done this reconstruction myself, I can tell you that absolutely NO ONE remembers what they said 40 years ago. No one remembers when meetings happened or who was there.

Take, for example, the famous Steve Jobs visits to Xerox PARC. I wasn't there so I didn't include them. But a podcast host told me he's talked to three people who were, and they have three different stories.

There are, in fact, some writers who manage to bring history to life without inventing dialog and scenes that maybe never happened. I salute them.

I personally do not think one is better than the other.

I stand by the saying "S.he who has read 1000 books has lived 1000 lives".

When fiction, the life of the characters. When "nonfiction", share the life and thoughts of the author(s).

I used to read a lot of sci-fi books in the past. Nowadays hardly one in ten books I read is sf. I just find most of what’s written these days boring. So I’d rather stick with non-fiction where I can learn shit. For fiction I prefer movies where I find the general quality better.

Have you tried reading fiction that’s not SF?

Literature is nice. My dad has a big collection of literature books that number in the thousands. I've read probably 20% of them.

Why on earth did you get downvoted? O_O

Because it’s some weird flex to explicitly say things like “my dad owns thousands of books” and “I read hundreds of those”.

OK, I see. I did read that differently and thus missed this angle.

Since when it became bragging to own books?

Because there's a thing called cultural capital, and it's not well shared in society.

The Internet is full of free knowledge. Everyone who's willing to learn can find a multitude of sources to do so. I don't feel privileged because my father happened to love reading. If he had a collection of wines or coins, or legos would I still be considered to brag about it?

I hope HN won't turn into Twitter where everyone finds something offending all the time.

Accessible knowledge, educated surroundings and internalized behavior (read: habit) to self-educate are three very different things.

Bourdieu is a good start on these topics.

Because someone is projecting his/her insecurities on me. Never mind, I've got karma to spend.

> stick with non-fiction where I can learn shit

Why would you do that? Why would you rather read something where you could learn something useful or even nice maybe? I mean of course you can read whatever you want. Genuinely curious.

Also shit or otherwise, it’s such a fallacious myth that you only learn from non-fiction.

At grave risk of wooshing, the person you responded to meant "shit" to mean "stuff". And while I love fiction, the best way to dump facts into my brain (and I suspect most people's brains) is directly. Cramming lectures into fiction does a grave disservice to both, and while a talented author can sneak them in such skill is often better applied to either domain alone.

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