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Re:Books I’ve read by pitched on Friday June 03, 2022 @04:10PM (#31613052)
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.

Re:Books I’ve read by corrral on Friday June 03, 2022 @04:36PM (#31613321)
> 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.

Re:Books I’ve read by AlbertCory on Friday June 03, 2022 @05:50PM (#31614125)
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.

Re:Books I’ve read by xcambar on Saturday June 04, 2022 @12:57AM (#31617143)
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).