629 sats \ 1 reply \ @Coyote_Cosmico OP 27 Dec 2023 \ parent \ on: What books served as your foundation? BooksAndArticles
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.
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.
reply