845 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 26 Dec 2023 \ on: What books served as your foundation? BooksAndArticles
You will get (and you have) got a ton of non-fic book recs. If you really want to become less of an idiot (which is a worthy thing to want) here's my "counterculture" advice: read literature -- fiction -- that has mattered to people. You can't go wrong with the classics, but honestly, for these purposes, it barely matters what you read.
Some authors who have meant a lot to me:
- Ernest Hemingway
- Irvine Welsh
- George Saunders
- Jose Saramago
- Jorge Luis Borges
- James Kellman
- Douglas Adams
- Richard Adams
- Denis Johnson
- John Steinbeck
If it elicited a big popular response, or a strong critical response, if people cared a lot about it, if it has stood the test of time, it means that something in there stirred something up in lots of people, and it's worth trying to understand that.
Really appreciate this, thank you. Picked up Steinbeck's The Pearl the other day to start reading more fiction.
I've often heard how important it is to read good literature, but have to admit that I've yet to fully internalize that attitude or habit - I've probably read 99% nonfiction after college.
What would you say to someone resistant to read things they feel like they can't "learn" from, or who feels like fiction is less practical?
Best explanation I've come across is that good fiction books can act as "life simulators" - they can take you through a range of human experience, usually extreme, so you come out the other end with something like wisdom instead of knowledge?
And maybe these works can address the more important questions, which just can't be given the same treatment in some kind of point by point nonfiction argument?
Maybe I'm coming at this too logically, and appreciating great art is the end in itself. Would love to hear your thoughts on this because I feel like I'm missing out.
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It's funny, sounds like you and I are on opposite journeys. For most of my life I never read non-fic unless it was for college or work. In the last five years or so I flipped and it was just a non-fic explosion; I may have gone years without reading fiction at all apart from this one book club I'm in that's half fiction.
Point is, I think I'm in a good position to answer your question.
What would you say to someone resistant to read things they feel like they can't "learn" from, or who feels like fiction is less practical?
But then you went on to give the exact answer I would have given:
Best explanation I've come across is that good fiction books can act as "life simulators"
Just so. Literature is life, distilled into book form. What it means to be a person, to live in the world, to struggle, to feel, to interact with others. All that blood and guts stuff. All those instruction manuals into what it's like to see the world from someone else's perspectives, all the implicit models of reality.
You can read ten books on bridges or aquaculture and what you learn there will be useful in those domain, and maybe cast a small halo onto other topics. Literature is about the universal lessons about being human, things that are hard to codify, that have been true for twenty thousand years and that will stay true.
In the years where I reduced my fiction payload by 95% I felt ... emptier, in a way. It's hard to describe. There is an "education" to being a person that you can get in ways besides reading literature, but fuck, reading literature is such a source of alpha. Even if if it brings you no joy at all, the utility of it is off the charts. But it's hard to imagine that you wouldn't get joy out of it if you followed your own heart. There's more things to your taste that are worth reading than you could read in ten lifetimes.
It's a joyous kind of training waiting for you.
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I second this idea. Recently, I started reading fictions again and it is very different cognitively than digesting information from a non-fiction book.
For what it's worth, my favorite fiction author is Kurt Vonnegut. His books are fun and pretty accessible.
Something I did when I was younger, in my quest to be less of an idiot, is have multiple books going at once. I'd rotate between fiction, science, philosophy, etc. If there's minimal overlap between the books it's easier.
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