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Comment by 8bitme | Hacker News Reader

> the goal of a book isn’t to get to the last page, it’s to expand your thinking.

I would apply this to fiction books too. Some people consider reading fiction books a waste of time.

But fiction books too can expand your mind by exploring ideas that may not be possible in non-fiction books or exploring the same ideas but in a way that non-fiction books cannot achieve easily or at all.

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As a kid, when I asked an uncle why he was always reading, he said "we read to know we are not alone". I don't know if he was quoting someone else, but I took it to mean that there are things that we think privately and don't share in any other medium but fiction. Not in conversation, film, etc.

We've all had that moment when reading fiction where we instantly recognise something and think to ourselves, 'huh, so I'm not the only one!'

For this reason, I think that fiction is an invaluable aspect of human communication.

I exclusively read nonfiction until I had a traumatic event happen to me. After that, I read fiction nonstop for several years. Fiction was the only thing that could help me process it. (Note: not escape the trauma, but help me process it. Nonfiction was too clean, black-and-white, etc. Too simple. Fiction presented a world of uncertainty and doubt that I could live through and thus reflect upon the traumas I had undergone.)

" In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."

-Mortimer J Adler

I think this quote applies too.

The way I've heard it phrased is "Non-fiction teaches us about the world, fiction teaches us about ourselves."

Do people really consider reading fiction a waste of time? I’d love to meet someone who says reading Mark Twain or Toni Morrison or Vladimir Nabokov is a waste of time. Actually … I don’t think I’d like to meet that person.

There are definitely some forms of fiction that are less enlightening than others, but even the “lowest” forms are generally time better spent than scrolling the internet or watching random TV channels.

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