I read some of fiction and some of nonfiction, but definitely skew to reading more nonfiction. One nonfiction book, which I think someone on HN told me isn't even the best book on its specific topic, was very meaningful to me and helped me learn a lot about myself. I read the entire book out loud to my dad when he was paralyzed, about three years after his paralyzing accident (which was about three years before he died). The book is The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition,[1] entirely nonfiction, but nonetheless a way to be transported into an earlier time and a place that I am unlikely ever to see in my lifetime. The characters were all real, but they all got me thinking about how I think and about how I get along in life. Great nonfiction can can provide more information about the world, humanity in general, and what's even more important, yourself, then you can ever glimpse by reading another science-fiction novel.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Shackletons-Legendary-Antarc...
However, many people (Bill Gates included apparently) operate under the opposite assumption that non-fiction gives you more information about the world by default. And that's simply not true. Fiction can change your views, give you new ideas and insights, challenge your beliefs, etc.
Fiction writers create based on their life experiences, their feelings and ideas and also the information they got from different sources. It's pure ignorance to assume they only offer brainless entertainment.
And what is the OP arguing about? Mr. Gates didn't say that non-fiction is always better for learning about the world.
>Non-fiction gives you more information about the world by default
Sorry, but it does. Easily testable hypothesis; go to the NY Times Bestsellers lists and compare, book-for-book, what can be "learned" from each (as most of us understand "learning"). In fact, it's hard to believe anyone is actually arguing this point.
Then again, with this community's penchant for nitpicking and distaste for Microsoft, I shouldn't be surprised. As someone who reads 40-50 books a year, I'm always grateful for these lists.
Of course he didn't, he said something worse. The literal quote from Bill Gates is: "But I read mostly nonfiction because I always want to learn more about how the world works".
The immediate conclusion that you can take from that is "if you want to learn more about how the world works, then don't read fiction". It's the assumption that fiction has value only as entertainment.
I'll give you just one example of the opposite. If you want to learn how people in the past thought and viewed the world, then an excellent way is reading the popular fiction of that time. Bonus points if you get to know how they read it.
>Sorry, but it does. Easily testable hypothesis; go to the NY Times Bestsellers lists and compare, book-for-book, what can be "learned" from each (as most of us understand "learning").
Sorry, but if you get to redefine things in order to suit your argument (the word learn), then you are right by default and there can't be any discussion. I won't follow you there.
I know there are excellent non-fiction books that teach you lots of things. But the reverse is true, there are garbage non-fiction books that teach you nothing.
For example: read "Confessions of a Heiress" by Paris Hilton. It's non-fiction, so by your logic, you will surely learn more about the world reading that than something like "1984" by George Orwell, right? Give me a break.
Your problem is assuming there's an immediate conclusion to be drawn.
Maybe you can take a step back and understand that this is a guy writing an article about some good books he read this year, rather than a treatise on the uselessness of fiction. Look at the context. Because I certainly didn't come to "the" immediate conclusion that you did.
A big component of reading comprehension is understanding context. Do you really think the purpose of what he wrote was what you imply? Maybe, but I doubt it. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
>I'll give you just one example of the opposite
Coming up with a single counter example doesn't dismiss the general. No one is arguing anywhere (including Mr. Gates) that all fiction is useless to learn from. Does me presenting one useless fiction book and one beneficial non-fiction book prove my point? Because I guarantee I have more examples.
>Sorry, but if you get to redefine things in order to suit your argument
Huh? My definition? I explicitly stated "as most of us understand it". Because, you know, most of us do understand the word a specific way. I stated it as such because I foresaw someone like you jumping in with some pseudo-intellectual argument that "learning is this, learning isthat", when 90% of us agree on what is implied by the phrase "to learn".
>For example: read "Confessions of a Heiress"
Wait a minute: on one hand you're telling me to read popular fiction of days past to gain insight into the views of others, then on the other you dismiss the non-fiction writings of a twentieth century pop-culture icon for its lack of similar insight? Brilliant. If you don't think the writings of someone like Paris Hilton can teach us anything about society and culture, on various levels, I don't know what to tell you.
>by your logic, you will surely learn more about the world reading that than something like "1984" by George Orwell, right? Give me a break.
Yes, that's my logic precisely. All non-fiction is better than fiction </s>.
I'll do the same: Twilight vs. A Brief History of Time. Which can you learn more from? Apparently by your twisted logic and cherry-picking, Twilight. Have fun with that.
Are you trying to argue for the sake of arguing? Not shocking, for the same reason that it wasn't surprising to see the top comment on a "best books I've read list" attacking the nuances of a single, throwaway line in the text, irrelevant to the actual content of the article. This community loves that. I guess it makes people feel smart.
Reread this thread, I didn't claim fiction as a whole is better than non-fiction in any way, but you did claim non-fiction as a whole gives you more information about the world by default, irrespective of individual examples. I'd be thankful if you stopped denying that you said what you said, or at least admit that you were mistaken.
You can't make blanket statements about categories like that, it's a futile exercise because you are putting great books and garbage books in the same box. They aren't all the same, neither in fiction nor in non-fiction. That's the critique we made to Bill Gates' blanket statement.
Instead of arguing for argument's sake, read what I wrote calmly and analyse it, none of your previous answers apply and I don't have the time to answer to each part of your comment. I'll just answer the only one in which you could have a point.
About Paris Hilton's book, it's true that there's some value in it, but you can't compare it to the value that you can take from 1984 and the insights it can give you about society and the human condition. And that was my point, a counterexample to the blanket statement "non-fiction gives you more information about the world than fiction by default". It simply isn't true. Literature is much more complex than that.
And by literature I talk both about fiction and non-fiction, I don't redefine things or refer to an imaginary "most of us".
"Scott for scientific method, Amundsen for speed and efficiency but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton."
The voyage of the James Caird must account as one of the greatest bits of seamanship in history:
I'd even suggest that some authors, particularly those with strong political views, may be motivated to write fiction in order to give support to their own ideas. It's a blank canvas onto which to project an idealized world, and to fulfill wishes. (If that's the case, it can serve as a mildly negative Bayesian signal about whether the ideas are really true. If there were so many real-world examples illustrating the beliefs, why would the author be moved to write fiction to promote them?)
Apart from politics, plots are more interesting when they're surprising, but almost by definition, surprising plots are less likely to be generalizable to the world.
(Of course, non-fiction can really be fiction in disguise, but at least non-fiction can be fact-checked. To cite a recent Hollywood example, wherever the movie Argo is suspenseful, it's simply made up. Minor spoiler: If you drew a lesson about how going directly against the instructions of both the President and your CIA boss can be a useful tool to cause your boss to suddenly rally around you and later commend your success, you would be gravely misled. Interesting plots thrive on such unrealistic conflict.)
Anyway, this is only a danger if the reader is credulous about what they are reading. But reading a lot of fiction can help a person learn to detect an author's point of view, biases, and, in some cases, hidden agendas.
This learning can be greatly accelerated by training. College-level literature courses teach students the mental framework to critically evaluate any piece of writing.
That's what a lot of good fiction is superb at installing in one's mind. It's what books can do like no other medium. Good fiction is as close as listening in on another's thought stream as we get. I think it's particularly valuable for children.
Now, there's also non-fiction writing that can do this - experience reports, auto-biographies, letter collections (some of my most formative young-age reading experiences were Robert Falcon Scott's expedition diaries and his letters of good-bye and regret written near his death). But there's an element of someone presenting themselves to the world there that I think fiction more frequently isn't affected by. Though it's true that authors speak through their characters, so fiction writing isn't unbiased either, of course.
The danger is - and Argo is one example but there are far, far worse (cough Dan Brown cough) - where you get fiction "based on true events". There are some lovely fictional biopics based on real people (Carter Beats the Devil springs to mind) but when you get the likes of the Da Vinci Code being taken as having some underlying truth I can see where you're coming from.
But I doubt very much that those people believing the "truth" in those works of fiction are the people fact checking non-fiction. In both those cases it feels as if the book isn't the problem, the person is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(2012_film)
The basic idea (making a sci-fi film as a cover for getting people out of Iran) is true, after that it's fairly heavily dramatised and pro-Americanised.
Worth saying that Affleck has always been relatively upfront about the dramatisation when asked about it in interviews, though I've not seen him asked about his depiction of the actions of the Canadian, British and New Zealand governments.
Thanks for the info, though. I have read about it before, and it's definitely an example of truth being stranger than fiction.
I like many people, read Shakespeare in high school and disliked it. Reading it again as an adult is a completely different experience, and one I highly recommend.
My favorite play is Titus Andronicus. How often do you have Anger, Rape, and Murder personified on stage, or forced cannibalism? The Quentin Tarantino of Shakespeare for sure.
Some people have argued that nobody should read Shakespeare until after forty. I'm younger than that, but it's true that one of the greatest pleasures of reading great literature is recognition - RE-cognition - and you have to live some before you can recognize something in a piece of art.
Really? The usual image is that techie geek types lap up scifi and fantasy, which when done properly are all about the human condition.
It should read:
I would say that all great books (fiction or nonfiction) are about the human condition.
You can stream it from PBS's website (there might be some geographic restrictions though, at least according to the comments): http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/macbeth/watch-the-ful...
Non-fiction teaches you about the world.
Fiction teaches you about yourself.
Good books teach you about the world and about yourself.
Also, I would add The Crying of Lot 49 to your list.
http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/
Ulysses is a singular book: Well-worth it if you love language, or for that matter almost anything about life as it is lived.
But then I admittedly have not gotten past page 200 of ulysses in the three times I've tried, so that may be coloring my perception.
But why or how is it good, then? Well, usually because the writer is a good writer (but not always, some books have no writers, or are good despite their bad writers).
And a good writer is just someone who has a very itchy scar somewhere and would die if not using writing as a bloodletting.
I don't see the world or even myself in the same way since.
For example truth about something like cultural revolution in China or religious wars in Europe is likely best conveyed in books.
Maybe when a truth is so bad it cannot be written then it has to be sung, or hummed, and music would be the deepest and most reptilian way to keep memories.
EDIT: I see below that you have your own top-level comment in which you mention a history of France you have read, and comment more generally that reading history is generally a good idea. I agree.
Camus said it best: 'Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.'
All that fiction and still buying into "us and them".
You might not have heard of some of her other novels. One such book, "Pavilion of Women", is almost life changing. It is subtle. It has an unmatched understanding and portrayal of human nature. Everyone I know who's read it has been affected by it.
I can't recommend "Pavilion of Women" enough - it was a magical experience to read it.
However, choosing to read fiction puts no lower bound on the amount of real information you will get nor the amount you will learn about the world, yourself, or humanity. Meanwhile, a non-fictional piece will at least have a reasonable guarantee to contain information of some kind.
It's like all those questions : would you rather do this, or live all your life with this. They are fun, but they are useless as they never happened. There is no point thinking about them besides playing with your imagination.
Fiction is the same to me, yes it came from a real context, but it's still a work of fiction and doesn't teach you anything about real life.
e.g. Are you gonna learn about dating by reading romantic novels or real life stories?
"You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer.
For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.
Is it true?
The answer matters.
You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen -- and maybe it did, anything's possible -- even then you know it can't be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, 'The fuck you do that for?' and the jumper says, 'Story of my life, man,' and the other guy starts to smile but he's dead.
That's a true story that never happened."
(PS I still read and enjoy fiction. I don't get why everyone's so up in arms about Bill Gate's mild preference for non-fiction)
Just because something happened doesn't mean it's useful to think about. Conversely, just because something never happened doesn't mean it isn't useful to think about. I've read fiction books that made me examine my perspective or way of life in a way that nothing else has, and I've read non-fiction books that didn't register a single change in me.
As one of "them" who often prefers non-fiction, I enjoyed the book for that reason. Incidentally, I think it's stronger in this fictionalized form than as it would have been as a straight-up autobiography.
And what is fiction based on, if not real life? Fiction is the number one way to learn how to see the world from the point of view of a completely different person, only in fiction can you leave your own shoes. I'm pretty sure that reading fiction makes you a better person, and it's proven that reading fiction improves a person's empathy [1]. Increased empathy means that you can put yourself into other leaders' heads and guess what made them make their decisions, thereby learning how the world works.
And yes, you can learn about dating from a romance novel, except that about 99% of them are not about real life.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/08/liter...
Your point is moot. Even non-fiction is fiction in a way. The writer may have changed details, selected only specific facts, hidden some parts of the truth. You never know. At least with fiction you KNOW it's made up, but with non-fiction you can not really tell what is true or not because of your limited knowledge of how it was written and redacted.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
As for dating, here's some good advice (assuming you're a man): grab a copy or Pride and Prejudice and read it to get a grasp of the female psyche. And if you don't read it at least carry it around where she will see.
Now, I know that many critics and authors I admire consider P&P to be one of the finest English-language novels ever written, so I have to ask: what am I missing?
With Austen, for a modern reader, there's a lot to appreciate. Her books give a perspective on what life was like as a member of a class (females) in a society which terribly oppressive for them. What would it be like to be a very intelligent, well-read person who is not allowed to hold a job at a professional or managerial level, not allowed to get a college education, not allowed (generally speaking) to travel freely or own property without restrictions. In many respects, this world is as alien to us as anything found in scifi or fantasy and is therefore a fascinating and horrifying view.
Austen will give you this perspective. If you pay attention closely, you can also learn quite a bit about the ground level view of the English class system in the regency period and how it worked for people on varying social strata. Her novel, Emma, is particularly good at this.
Even the focus on courtship and marriage, which many people will find completely frivolous, has an interesting message. I can't find the exact quote so this is from memory, Austen once remarked that her focus on marriage was because the marriage proposal was the one free choice (in terms of refusal) women were allowed to have. And considering the social and legal power the husband would have over the wife, the woman's choice becomes the thing which will determine the course of her life. From this point of view, there's no wonder why marriage is presented as such an overwhelmingly important event.
I hope you'll give her books another chance.
Are you gonna learn about dating by reading romantic novels or real life stories?
You may not learn about dating by reading Ishiguro, but it's the case that the profound humanity of his writing makes you a more compassionate and confident person and that's the kind of stuff that can and will make you more desirable to be around.
I contend that you'd learn an awful lot more about love and relationships from a novel like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, than you ever will from 'non-fiction' like The Game (which you've mentioned up-thread).
Drawing a clear distinction between fiction and non-fiction is in my opinion pointless - you can tell any story you like by using selected facts, you can tell multiple stories with the same facts, and people often do twist the truth when reminiscing and celebrating the past, or present the truth from a very limited, insular point of view in so-called non-fiction books. So in this sense I see non-fiction as very similar to fiction; it's used to tell stories, to present the world as the author sees it, and to educate and entertain. All of these functions are performed by both fiction and non-fiction, and in both cases we're trusting the author to tell us something about the world from their perspective.
The best stories (be they memories of a real-world event, or imagined events based on life experience) transcend the particular and become lessons about human behaviour and life.
Well, if you are straight guy, you could learn a lot (everything) about what women want by carefully reading the romance novels they read.
There's also this embedded assumption in your statement and in BG's that non-fiction tells some sort of factual truth about "real life." Negatory.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#The_Geostation...
Well, since romantic novels aren't really about dating, I'm not sure the question makes sense. A better question would be: "Will you learn more about love from reading fiction or by reading nonfiction?" And for that I think the answer is obvious.
I don't know how we got to the point where so many see entertainment for it's own sake as a negative thing.
Even the pleasure that comes from addiction and drug use indicates that learning is taking place -- learning the context of the 'high' (more and more subtle detail concerning the smell of the coffee, the crackle of the cigarette paper, the label of the wine being poured, the faces of one's fellow drinkers, etc, and linking this information to the pleasure itself).
Contrariwise, if one is not entertained, if one cannot find some pleasurable feature in the situation, then one is learning nothing. So learning without entertainment is not possible either!
Boy oh boy, if I had a quarter every time I heard that probably I could get a tall Starbucks latte. Many, many people are under the assumption that fiction is stuff that somebody made up and hence useless while non-fiction gives you information about the world; so if you're a busy person, read non-fiction (it's of, course debatable if such a neat classification even can be done). What these people do not realize is that great fiction can provide more information about the world, humanity in general, and what's even more important, yourself, then you can ever glimpse by reading another Gladwell book.