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The meaning of a word is determined by its context, so it's not particularly significant or objectionable that "books" is used to mean fiction here. I think you're being a bit dramatic with regards to having to read fiction in school. Society has decided that reading fiction is part of a well-rounded education. The same objections you make could be made about having to learn algebra; most people can object that they will never directly use it in later life and that they could have spend the time learning other things. In both cases an argument for teaching it is that it exercises the mind, developing a sense of abstraction in the case of algebra, and imagination and empathy in the case of literature, I would argue. It is not useful to compare the value of fiction versus non-fiction, they have completely different functions, and there's no reason for it to be a case of either/or.

> The meaning of a word is determined by its context, so it's not particularly significant or objectionable that "books" is used to mean fiction here.

While I believe that books should mean, say, what is sold on Amazon or what is in a large public or academic library, for "context," here on HN books are more like the ones I listed, e.g., Knuth, and not what is emphasized in NYR. Gee, is there some irony here?

> I think you're being a bit dramatic with regards to having to read fiction in school.

But being "dramatic" is heavily what fictional literature is about, right? More irony here?

> Society has decided that reading fiction is part of a well-rounded education.

Well, if not "society" then a lot of people in K-12 education, people, who, a guess, were English majors in college. There's some social-academic field self-perpetuation here, maybe?

> The same objections you make could be made about having to learn algebra; most people can object that they will never directly use it in later life and that they could have spend the time learning other things.

I explain more in

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8410549

in this tread. There I mention that in the grade 1-12 school I went to, algebra was optional. I took it, sure, along with all the math that was offered.

In that post, I also explained that much of my objection to fictional literature was the amount of it required with significant math and science having many fewer years and all those optional.

So, in grades 1-12 I want to, and as I explain at a comparatively good school, the dichotomy is not just fictional literature versus algebra but 12 years of such literature, required, versus just four years of math (beyond trivial arithmetic), one year of chemistry, and one year of physics, all optional and none very advanced. Bummer.

> It is not useful to compare the value of fiction versus non-fiction, they have completely different functions, and there's no reason for it to be a case of either/or.

Well, we can compare years required, and this long after the Age of Reason and the rise of the STEM fields, the 12 years of English as essentially just fictional literature, with, say, just one year of physics, is way, way too much. We should be in line for some disruption. At the very least the 12 years should teach a lot of writing, no, not creative writing or how to write fictional literature but writing for business, law, medicine, politics, and the STEM fields. Maybe eventually such writing lessons could actually leak over into journalism?

> In both cases an argument for teaching it is that it exercises the mind, developing a sense of abstraction in the case of algebra, and imagination and empathy in the case of literature, I would argue.

I can have some agreement with such an argument, but there is much more to consider. And, as simple as your argument is, it was never clear in the 14 years of English I was force fed. In fact, no reasonable purpose was made clear.

Yes, it was suggested that some of fictional literature could teach about people. Hmm .... Eventually I did learn some about people, via experience and some well respected materials out of, say, the clinical psychology field, especially E. Fromm, The Art of Loving, i.e., love and emotions, psychology, and religion.

Now that I have learned, I can return to some of fictional literature and see that, yes, some lessons were there as examples of, say, candidate human behavior.

E.g., can watch the movie In Harm's Way where there are four women: One is really a total slut; she is married but, still, when her husband is not around, likes to go to a party, get drunk, pick a man, go to a beach, go skinny dipping, and spend the night. Another woman wants to be a slut but hides it even from herself, E.g., she is engaged and there behaving with high propriety but, when her fiance is not around, goes to a party, undresses to her undies, and tempts her escort, whom she suspected needed no tempting, to rape her. The third is an excellent version of a wonderful, perceptive, supportive, devoted, loving wife and mother to be. And the fourth is an excellent example of a woman for a man past being a father again. So, Otto Preminger gave a nice range of possibilities. But, unless walk into the movie already knowing these lessons, possibilities, fairly well, will likely miss the significance. Thus, the movie is more entertainment, say, to reinforce what the audience already knows, instead of a way to learn more.

Really, mostly, over the years, I've had to conclude that fictional literature is a poor way to learn much of anything significant about people; I will grant that there are a lot of examples that might provide more on your "empathy"; even here, if that is one of the intended lessons, then it is taught indirectly and ineffectively.

Background 1 -- Seriousness: When I read some fiction and take it seriously, I want clear presentations of the points being made and good evidence for the reality, correctness, and practical relevance of the points.

Background 2 -- Art: Or, I can like some of art, and one definition is the communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion.

Conclusion: Instead of such seriousness or even such art, I finally concluded that the content of nearly all of fictional literature is just presenting to the reader vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment. Teaching good, solid lessons about people? Not very much.

So, here we have a case of literary criticism of literary criticism.

Net, for the teaching of English, I suggest: (1) Cut way back the required time spent on fictional literature. (2) For the fictional literature taught, be much more clear on just what the content is supposed to mean and why we should take it seriously. (3) Do much more in teaching writing other than creative writing.

Easily half of the NYRB writings are about non-fiction, FYI.

Above, you have confined yourself to technical non-fiction, and a narrow range of technical non-fiction at that (math and computer science). So the same observation you make about Parks (unconsciously assuming "books" equals fiction) could be made about you.

And in fact, the NYRB has had a series of articles by Stephen Weinberg (http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/steven-weinberg-2/) and by Freeman Dyson (http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/freeman-dyson/) providing a broad, humanist perspective on technical subject areas and their history.

One of my favorite of their non-fiction writers is Mary Beard (http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/beard-mary/) who has an amazing command of Greek and Roman history, and can integrate multiple perspectives to put you back at that far-off time (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/cleopat...).

> Easily half of the NYRB writings are about non-fiction, FYI.

So, it's non-fiction mostly because it is reviews? But nearly all the reviews are about fictional literature, right?

Before I posted, to learn more about the NYR I went to their Web site and to their page "About the Review" at

http://www.nybooks.com/about/

and read.

There, yes, I saw

"Freeman Dyson described the scientist as rebel"

but that's not Dyson's science, e.g., what he did to clean up Feynman's math, what he did in operations research in WWII, etc.

I also saw that they describe themselves as "a literary and critical journal". So, it's about fictional literature.

> Above, you have confined yourself to technical non-fiction

Really, I just gave some examples, but from long reading of HN I do have to conclude that my computer science examples are really typical of some of the best of what is of interest here at HN. So, the "books" of the NYR are not much like the books of HN.

> So the same observation you make about Parks (unconsciously assuming "books" equals fiction) could be made about you.

Not about me but maybe about HN.

I didn't see mention of the Weinberg articles.

Really, the several categories of books, fiction, non-fiction, humanism, literature, etc. aside, the more clear dichotomy is C. P. Snow's Two Cultures -- just two. There HN is firmly in one of these two and the NYR, the other.

NYRB reviews many non-fiction books. I would go as far as saying that 3/4 of the books they review are non fiction.

I chose an archived issue at random:

http://www.nybooks.com/issues/2014/jul/10/

There are only 4 works of fiction reviewed there. Everything else is either world politics, finance, or historical events. Science and philosophy are very heavily reviewed also.

If you never read an issue of the NYRB I highly encourage it. It is one of my favorite publications and it's bi-monthly so the quality is very high.

Daniel Mendelsohn's pieces alone are worth the price of a subscription

I'm big on long tail Web sites and much more in specialization, regard these, via the Internet, as potentially major sources of progress for civilization, literally.

So, the NYRB should change their "a literary and critical journal" which, in my case, of course, takes me back to senior English with the teacher leaning back, gazing at the ceiling in some state of ecstasy about some belle lettre thing and, thus, makes me want to reach for a fire ax and swing at anything related, for art as communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion.

If the NYRB has some non-fiction, i.e., some stuff that is actually true, then terrific.

"Easily half of the NYRB writings are about non-fiction" means that easily half of the books reviewed are non-fiction books. And, looking over the books listed in the current issue (http://www.nybooks.com/issues/2014/oct/23/), there certainly seems to be a solid majority of non-fiction books.

Seems like your best years of learning were seriously wasted at least partially because you either refused or seemed incapable of learning from the books you were forced to read.

Its great that you have a love of learning from nonfiction, I wish more people had the desire you do, but there is a lot to learn from fiction if you are open to it.

The books they forced me to read, just what the heck were the intended lessons? Tough to say. Since then I saw that I should have just gotten the CliffsNotes; they make it clear and explicit just what the heck the really big lessons are supposed to be. The books and teachers didn't.

> but there is a lot to learn from fiction if you are open to it.

Being "open to it" is not nearly enough. Knowing about people is important, darned important, and I knew that in quite clear terms in the fifth grade and since.

A big problem is, the works of fictional literature just do not make clear just what their points are or give solid support for their points. Instead, it's all just a definite maybe. For any intended lessons, the works of fictional literature just are not solid enough to take seriously, and there are now much better sources, ones that make clear just what they are claiming and provide relatively solid support for their claims.

It's a shame that you have such disdain toward capital L literature because some of the best writing on fiction is done by people who share your criticisms.

I fail to see the difference between your dismissal of fiction and a mathephobe's statement "when will we ever use this stuff in the real world." I don't know how an intelligent person can argue in good faith that fiction is not only meritless but basically useless. It takes very little effort to look around and see how untrue that statement is.

> "when will we ever use this stuff in the real world."

No. The complaint is more "why are we studying this instead of something else", and the various values of 'something else' have made a better case than Literature has.

Not just practical utility, but mind-expansion (pure math), understanding the world (history, especially recent history), and understanding fellow human beings (sociology and psychology).

"understanding fellow human beings (sociology and psychology)" You just defined fiction.

If you said that the purpose of fiction was to help us understand others, you'd have a lot of authors very mad at you.

I eagerly await a list of some of these authors.

> "when will we ever use this stuff in the real world."

That can be tough to see, even when there is a lot of value in the real world.

Some of what some such math has going for it is being part of a rock solid directed acyclic graph of theorems and proofs that are about the highest quality thinking. e.g., little risk of being wrong, on the planet.

Next, much of the math is both quite abstract and general, both so much so that in principle, and sometimes in practice, a lot of applications are possible.

Next, some of the intention is to prepare for the future, and, since that future is not here yet, now we have to guess at what the most solid tools will be.

> I don't know how an intelligent person can argue in good faith that fiction is not only meritless but basically useless.

That claim is stronger than I made, but, still, my main criticism is that, according to 20th century standards of intellectual safety and efficacy, fictional literature looks poor in comparison, in particular, because it (1) does not make clear just what it is claiming to be true and (2) fails to give solid evidence for much in such claims. So, as information or knowledge we don't much know what we have.

To be a little nicer to fictional literature, at times it can describe situations in human experience, say, suffering. But, for one, the experiences, e.g., the suffering, are not given a solid description, that is, are not documented with good facts and references. E.g., we have famous fictional literature about the French Revolution, but from all that literature I read, and, indeed, the history courses, it was never explained that due to The Little Ice Age there had just been three years of crop failures so that many peasants were starving. Should have been mentioned. For another, solid solutions are rarely even considered, much less often presented. So, such fictional literature can make a reader feel some pains but be helpless at alleviating the pains -- incompetent.

I said long ago in high school, if a writer of fictional literature actually has something important to say, then they should write an essay.

I had one course each year in 1-12 that had me reading fiction, that was English/Language Arts. My math, science, history and other courses focused almost exclusively on non-fiction. Where did you go to school that they only provided fictional science and math texts?

I will try to be still more clear: For 14 years, that is, grades 1-12 and the first two years of college, English, nearly all just fictional literature, was required, and math and science got nowhere near as much time and mostly were just optional. I took all the math and science that was available, but that was just six years of math, two of chemistry, and two of physics. Moreover, the math and science were too simple.

You mentioned history: There I saw too little in detail and attention to causality to take the content seriously. Also the history courses spent far too much time on the really old stuff, including 2000+ years ago, and not nearly enough time after 1800. And for the old stuff, they neglected the roles of domestic animals, masonry, military technology, metals, open ocean sailing and trade, the longitude problem, coal, steel, and steam. For after 1900, eventually I learned that from TV, e.g., the series Victory at Sea.

So, I was effectively blocked from anything significant in non-fiction until math and physics in my last two years of college; there I was a double major in math and physics but at the last moment dropped physics as a major and was only a math major.

From grade 5 on, I very much wanted the math and science. Being force fed fictional literature for 14 years was a really big bummer -- I was torqued and still am.

During those bad 14 years, at one point I did push ahead: My last three years in college were in a relatively good school with, actually, a quite good math department. But, to save money, my freshman year in college was in a state school I could walk to. There they wouldn't let me take calculus but forced me to take a math course beneath what I'd already covered in high school. So, I got a respected calculus book, dug in, and learned freshman calculus on my own. Then, in my sophomore year in the better college, I started with their sophomore calculus, using the same text as Harvard, and did well. So, I taught myself freshman calculus and, actually, never took it or got course credit for it.

Bad high school? Not comparatively: It was by a wide margin the best public high school in the city and, really, better than the few, small private schools. MIT came recruiting, and the year before me three guys went to Princeton and ran against each other for President of the Freshman Class.

I see a problem: English, as essentially just fictional literature, was required and got pushed hard for 14 years with nothing else even comparable. I was and remain torqued.

Now, here on HN, fictional literature is very much not the source of "the books we talk about". Good.

It's unfortunate that the math and science that you took apparently weren't up to your abilities and interests. It's also unfortunate that you didn't like your history either--certainly a lot of history taught in schools is overly focused on dates and kings although I'd argue that learning about the scope of history rather than just post-1800 is valuable.

That said, you seem to lay the blame for all that on having to take what I assume was more or less an English literature class throughout that period (though I doubt it was such in 1st grade). Yes, high school literature in particular can be biased toward writers I didn't like then and (mostly) don't like now. But I personally think there's a lot of value in appreciating great literature (as well as other fiction). I'm sorry you apparently prefer to only read programming books.

> I'd argue that learning about the scope of history rather than just post-1800 is valuable.

So would I. But much more is known about the years since 1800 than before year 1000, yet my most serious history courses spent so much time before year 0 they never made it to 1800 although they were supposed to.

Moreover, drawing from a Markov assumption, which commonly does hold over time, for understanding 1900, what the situation was in 1800 is important, but, given what that situation was in 1800, what the situation was, in addition, in year 1000 or 1000 BC is next to irrelevant.

Of course, what we really need to care about from history is what it can tell us about now and 10, 50, 100 years from now. For that, sure, can even just start in 1800 and lose very little from ignoring 1000 BC. Still, sure, I'd go along with a fast pass to year 1000, a little slower to year 1800, and then dig in.

The academic study of history seems to be more an infatuation with the past than a source of lessons for the future, or from just a movie, "a passion for antiquities."

> That said, you seem to lay the blame for all that on having to take what I assume was more or less an English literature class throughout that period (though I doubt it was such in 1st grade).

No, I was careful not to say "class" or "course". They taught English in grades 1-6, and there the reading was essentially all just fictional literature, and the writing assignments were all essentially just versions of story telling, but the actual separate courses in English didn't start until grade 7.

> But I personally think there's a lot of value in appreciating great literature (as well as other fiction).

If that stuff is to be required, then the claims and support for them should be made clear.

For appreciation, I'm a big fan of classical music. E.g., last night it was the von Karajan recording of the R. Strauss Ein Heldenleben. To me, passionate stuff. Highly meaningful. Still, very few people will get much out of that music. But, I do appreciate it, but just how and why are long stories. Net, I couldn't recommend that a music appreciation class with such music be required.

Similarly for a class in appreciation of great literature. STEM subjects? Sure.

> I'm sorry you apparently prefer to only read programming books.

Take a pass through either of, say, Jacques Neveu, Mathematical Foundations of the Calculus of Probability or David G. Luenberger, Optimization by Vector Space Methods I listed, which I have done, especially the first, and still claim that these are "programming books". Both have as prerequisites a solid undergraduate pure math background; the first is heavily about measure theory, especially the Radon-Nikodym theorem; both are heavily about functional analysis, e.g., Hilbert and Banach spaces; and the second is heavily about the Hahn-Banach theorem.

I take it that you like fictional literature. Well, I don't. And, whether I like it or not, since there is no common and very good case for the value other than just entertainment, I suggest that less of it be force fed.

The original article was about books people discuss with friends in real life, not online. How many of these books do you actually talk about?

Although it's commonly recommended, I can't remember ever actually talking with someone else who's also read *The C Programming Language" about the contents of that book, though if they're a programmer we might discuss something about C if it comes up.

By talking about, I was including on HN, and all of those books so qualify.

For K&R, sure, I've talked about it, yes, orally. E.g., for that book, what's with the idiosyncratic syntax? And why the case of x+++++y? And some cases of declare statements can be real puzzles that can need talking about -- there is even a sparse, too sparse, discussion in the book. And to talk, should mention why the language was designed to run in about 8 K bytes on a DEC machine (helps explain y =+ x). And, in one discussion, I got led to where in K&R actually can find the actual memory allocation technique used by MALLOC and FREE. We should talk about what we are paying now, when we use C (or really C++ which was originally just a preprocessor to C), due to the original 8 KB constraint when now main memory goes for about $10/GB and motherboards commonly support 32 GB of ECC main memory. So, yes, we do still talk about C and K&R.

C stands to be around for a long time, and I'm sure that students new to programming will do a lot of talking about K&R. While in college, they may do the talking in person at some social gatherings.

I've talked about, in person, the contents of K&R with people who were learning C; why did they choose to present things in that order? What kinds of practical aspects of the language are omitted? et cetera.

I guess it depends on your friends, but I'll support the parent's case of some of those being great in-person discussion books, especially Knuth. And lots of great math books. Knuth's little "romance novel", Surreal Numbers, is a great example of a highly discussable math book.

How would you classify historical fiction?

Mostly as not true!

Recently I watched via YouTube all of Winds of War, right "historical fiction". I wanted to learn more about WWII. Well, the lessons about what really happened in WWII, except for the holocaust, were a bit low on solid credibility, e.g., the meeting with Mussolini.