Choosing what to read
tratt.net
tratt.net
We have been taught the history of colonialism in school, for many, many years. I don't think I understood what colonialism was, or what it was like to be colonized. Until I read fiction in my adult life. You could know the historical facts by heart, but to get a sense of what something was like from a subjective point of view (which is also a kind of knowledge), I don't think that fiction and history are comparable.
I also knew some history about slavery, I also watched movies about it, I thought I knew the salient points about slavery, until I recently read Frederic Douglass, the narrative of an escapee from slavery[1]. Yes, it's not fiction, but I got some insight into what it was like to be a slave, from within, and I don't think I would have ever gotten this kind of insight through history, facts, whatnot.
The author clearly underestimates the power of fiction, even as a vehicle of knowledge.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_of_the_Life_of_Frede...
There's another way to discover history through fiction, which is to read old books and try to understand the author's point of view. For instance, going on with your example of colonialism-slavery, I remember reading "Gone with the wind": I was astonished by the author's racism. Not a slaver's racism, but the permeating belief that Black people where inferior people, a kind of a big children, with big feelings and little intelligence.
I've also learned to be wary of history books, which are sometimes very imaginative (like the tale about about José Figueres in the OP's excerpt) and other times bent to suit the author's beliefs. If I'm really interested in the subject, I usually search for multiple sources.
Back to your example, reading non-fiction after you had turned 30 (let’s say some historiography) would have made you more aware that basing one’s perception of a specific past historical phenomenon on one work of fiction is very problematic, you’re practically adopting that person’s whole worldview, with all the pluses and the minuses that come with that.
For example reading authors like Douglass doesn’t account for not “explain” how come the abrupt end of slavery was not the best thing ever in the short to middle term for lots of Black people from the US South, we need history books in order to try and make sense of that (interspersed with some sociology, economic history, anthropology and oral history accounts that we were lucky enough to put onto written form).
sorry but why is this the thing.
Some other books are stories of specific people, and put you close enough to their life to share their feelings. "Gay Berlin" is a good example.
I must agree with you that fiction is much better at this, but it might be easy to associate complete fiction with how things really were. I canonised what happens in Grapes of Wrath as history, but those characters are fictional.
> Bayard's most popular book, How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read (Minuit, 2007), is a bestseller in France in which he engages in a study of the different ways of not reading a book, and recommends solutions to be able to talk about it anyway. Assuming that some readers have a terrifying understanding of reading, he tries to make them feel free from guilt for not having read canonical literature. The essential thing in culture being to have an overview, he claims the possibility of having a perforated and incomplete culture. Pierre Bayard has renewed this system in Comment parler des lieux où l'on n'a pas été, a work in the second degree again, in which he reviews the authors who have spoken of places they have not visited.
> Moreover, humour is a fundamental element of his writing. In How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read, the narrator teaches the way not to read, which is a joke because he himself is a great reader. For Pierre Bayard, humour has an analytical function. It allows you to mark a gap between yourself and yourself, and therefore to distance yourself from what you read.
The hardest thing to convince new students who join my group is that every single day they need to alternate between reading at least one paper in their field or at least one random paper from somewhere else, and spend some time reading a book. Record everything into a bib file. Once you develop this habit you will end up with a massive bibliography by the end of say 5 or 6 years. Over 20 years of doing this I've read 1000 books (1 per week) and thousands of papers. Our more fun research projects have all come from random connections between ideas that never would have occurred to me without this broad knowledge base.
I also found that non-fiction is more interesting than fiction. Fiction needs to be believable, non-fiction doesn't. Non-fiction captures a complex, layered reality with characters that are often at odds with others and even themselves. Sometimes they randomly died off, sometimes they show up again in unexpected places. A fiction author would have to be an absolute master to create such a complex world.
I suggest looking into some better-known fiction writers from the past, as my experience has been entirely the opposite to yours. I find good fiction to be infinitely better at creating complex realities, whereas nonfiction tends to all operate from the same contemporary pseudo-omniscient viewpoint.
I happened to be listening to this podcast this morning, which is actually about the exact topic of fiction and history:
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/fiction-history
It's about Joseph Conrad, whom I definitely recommend as a writer worth reading.
I find that good fiction stretches the mind to explore new ideas that non fiction can’t do since it is rooted in reality and known facts.
I find that i try to juggle one fiction book and one non-fiction book at a time. There are times when my mind wants to be rooted in reality, fact, and true history. But then sometimes (even within the same reading session) I may switch to fiction to let my mind wander in new ways which sometimes results in ideas and conceptualization in my real life brought by the fiction exploration.
Wow! Stuff you will discover on HN. Never knew about José Figueres Ferrer, but his story and 20th century history of Costa Rica seems fascinating and worth further exploring :)
https://mattlakeman.org/2023/10/09/notes-on-ghana/
His recent "Notes on [...]" series describing different countries in West Africa is full of interesting stuff. The latest entry, on Ivory Coast (officially Cotê d'Ivoire), was posted here a few days ago and I've been enjoying working back from there.
That's a funny story. In fact, too funny and hardly believable...
According to a NYT article from the time of these events, the 4 hijackers accepted to release their hostages after a promise that they would get a plane back to their country. The hostages were released as planned, but then the hijackers where met by 200 armed soldiers and the President, himself armed with a submachine gun. Two of the hijackers were killed. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/12/19/archives/president-says-n...
The tale where an old man with a machine-gun forces hijackers to surrender is more striking. Who cares if it seems impossible? Some newspapers (LA Times, Time) even propagated this, and now it's in Wikipedia-en, but not the Spanish version.
I think the NYT is a better source and its story is much more plausible. But the showdown is less funny and flattering. The President broke his promise. He did confront the hijackers, but he was protected by 200 soldiers, and the 4 hijackers had already surrendered.
Even if he had 200 soldiers - still taking his time to be right there on the ground is something that stands out.
That's not remotely the same story as "the president stood on the tarmac with a machine gun until the hijackers surrendered", a fabricated fairytale version.
I am from another part of the globe.
I do understand people might take it at face value and run with the idea. But also Ilive long enough to understand hostage situations are not what you see in the movies. Anyone who can read between the lines should know better.
I do understand it was also his marketing of tough guy. But still I have to say if he was down there with the troops it still checks my mark. If he ordered to shoot hijackers right there like 10 meters away and not from cozy office it still counts as tough guy for me.
The one exception is I do read some fiction, but even then it’s rarely by living authors. Inherently, contemporary fiction has the same transient problem that the news does. So by and large I only read fiction by dead authors. If it’s still in print years / decades / centuries later (and people are still talking about it) there’s a much higher probability that it’s good (assuming it’s to my taste).
Reading for pleasure is one of the great joys of life. It’s a far more intense multimedia experience than, say, watching a movie. My only real problem is that I have to use a timer to force me to stop.
Another thing I like about reading historical non-fiction is that in the modern world it is almost alway possible to dig in deeper on anything you read. There are different more detailed books/articles on the subject, often internet accessible primary documents, etc. and this ability dig deeper and deeper on a subject just cannot exist for fictional worlds.
e.g. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
In my opinion, it belongs more in the pop-sci category more usually written by non-experts.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YKErue3HYoE9r4K9q/is-it-true...
There are however some brilliant authors that combine the two genres, sometimes more on the site of history, sometimes more on the site of fiction. Some random recommendations: Tolstoi: "War and Peace", Solzhenitsyn: "The Red Wheel" cycle, Yourcenar: "Memoirs of Hadrian", Brecht: "The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar", Foote: "The Civil War: A Narrative" (non-fictional narrative history).
i read only non-fiction. but i retain almost nothing from it.
sometimes question the point. just to pass time.
Linked from "Why books donʼt work" - https://andymatuschak.org/books/ - "Books are easy to take for granted. Not any specific book, I mean: the form of a book. Paper or pixels—it hardly matters. Words in lines on pages in chapters. And at least for non-fiction books, one implied assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. This last idea so invisibly defines the medium that it’s hard not to take for granted, which is a shame because, as we’ll see, it’s quite mistaken."
As for history books mentioned in TFA, they are basically fiction. No category has more lies and propaganda than history, but the older the more closer to truth. And if you read a history book from a hundred years ago, at least you learn something about how people thought a hundred years ago. I wouldn't touch a recently written history book. On top of being full of lies, they're also incredibly boring and materialistic.