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Is it better to read fiction or non-fiction?
Monday, 22 May 2006
One of the most popular articles I’ve written on this site so far has been Five excellent mind habits to develop. It’s been generally well received, but I have come in for some criticism for my belief that it’s a better mind habit to read non-fiction than fiction.
I think this is an important point, so I want to expand on it a bit further. I’ve come to realize that this is a much more controversial idea than I believed when I first wrote it. The enjoyment of fiction is something many people hold dear. All I ask from such people is that they read this with an open mind and genuinely consider what I have to say.
The first thing I want to clear up is that my original statement wasn’t supposed to be as black and white as some have interpreted it. This could be my fault, in that the phrasing may not have been clear enough. But I also suspect I touched a raw nerve with some, which often leads to people to see ideas through the distortion of absolutes.
I am not saying that fiction has nothing to teach us.
Please read the above sentence again if you’re feeling hot under the collar at the mere suggestion of my argument.
What I am saying is that, generally, you’ll learn a lot more by reading non-fiction than you will by reading fiction. I think this is a fairly obvious point, but apparently some people think it’s quite radical.
If you’re still sceptical, let me try to convince you further.
When you read fiction, you're basically being exposed to the imagination of a particular person. When you read non-fiction, you're being exposed to the imagination of reality. And the real world is a far more complex and interesting place than the inside of anybody’s head.
Take, for example, the fact that our sun is a giant ball of fire over 100 times the diameter of the Earth. And our sun is just one of over 200 billion stars in our galaxy. And our galaxy is only one of hundreds of billions in the universe.
Well, it boggles the mind.
It’s such a fantastically amazing fact, that it could only have been thought up by nature. In all man’s musings about what the stars and the sun were before the invention of the telescope, none were even close to being on the same scale of imagination as the actual truth. The fact that most people believed the Earth was the center of the universe until a few hundred years ago tells us a lot about the limits of our imagination.
And this is just one of the many astonishing facts and mysteries that you can learn from science. And science is just one of the many interesting subjects you can read about in non-fiction. You’ve got history, politics, business, art & crafts, technology, philosophy, psychology and so on.
Even a humble cookbook can teach you useful skills – this is what people like to eat and how to prepare it.
What can the average novel teach you when compared to the average work of non-fiction? Not much, I’d argue.
At this point, many people say to me – well, what about the classics? Surely you can learn a lot from Dante, Homer, and Shakespeare? Surely they’ve helped to push humanity forward?
To which I’d reply, absolutely you’re correct. But if we’re comparing classics, even those giants pale in comparison to Newton, Einstein and Darwin in the high-stakes contest of expanding our understanding of the universe.
And what do most people really learn when reading literary classics anyway? After reading Tolstoy, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, I’m at a bit of a loss as to what I actually learnt from the experience. I’m sure they told me something about what it is to be human, but it’s difficult to put my finger on exactly what that something was.
Mostly, they were just interesting, well-written stories. Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” and Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” are, in my opinion, much better texts for understanding the human condition.
Often, when I've learnt something from fiction, it's been by reading works that interpret that fiction. Essays on the meaning and brilliance of Shakespeare can often be more enlightening than reading the great man himself. And if we’re drawing a line in the sand, those essays probably belong on the side of non-fiction.
I’m not trying to belittle works that are of obvious genius. Instead, I’m saying that the average person probably doesn’t find out much that is of use by reading them. If their aim was to improve their mind, they’d probably be better off heading towards the non-fiction section.
Many people have argued that fiction often contains factual information. Tom Clancy writes about politics and John Grisham about the law. This may be true, but remember what the purpose of those gentlemen’s writing is – to entertain. If facts get in the way of entertainment, you can be sure that they’ll be dispensed with. Because of this, you can never be sure what’s fact and what’s not. I’ve often heard people make statements based on “facts” they’d read in a novel which I knew were false. There’s a reason John Grisham novels aren’t assigned texts at law school.
A book like "1984" will likely teach you a lot about the nature of tyranny. But not, I’d argue, as much as a book by a Holocaust survivor, or a history of Stalin’s Russia. This is simply because the former only occurred inside George Orwell’s head, while the latter actually happened .
Science fiction fans have also taken me up on the fiction versus non-fiction debate. They say their preferred genre helps push human understanding forward. Well, there have been some documented cases of this, but they’re rare. Sci-fi borrows much more heavily from real science than vica-versa. As with John Grisham and law, there's a reason William Gibson novels aren't assigned texts in computer science courses.
The truth is you’ll learn more about science from the average introductory high-school textbook than you will from 95% of sci-fi novels. That is, unless you took the brute-force approach of reading 95 novels to every one textbook, and even then I’d be sceptical. And you’ll still come across the problem that entertainment will always trump fact in such works if the choice has to be made.
So once again we come back to my original point, which is that you’ll generally expand your mind more by reading non-fiction than you will by reading fiction.
Writing fiction is the art of lying in an entertaining way. Non-fiction is at least an attempt at telling the truth.
I’m generally of the opinion that entertaining lies are of less educational value than attempts at the truth.
It’s a radical theory, I know.
Now before I get another bunch of angry emails, please read this sentence again: I am not saying that fiction has nothing to teach us.
Fiction does play a part in rounding out the learning of every educated person. It’s particularly helpful in learning to write and speak well. It can provide clear analogies for understanding difficult concepts. It’s also a source of great enjoyment for many people.
But, if your aim is expanding your mind, and you want to make the best use of your time, try to read mostly non-fiction.
That’s a “mostly” in that last sentence, not an “only”.
Due to their experiences in school, many people naturally assume that non-fiction will be quite boring. Considering how uninteresting your average history or science class is, I’m surprised anyone manages to maintain an interest in those subjects when they reach adulthood. But there are many non-fiction titles that are as interesting – if not more interesting – than fiction. Don’t let your dull teachers steal this pleasure from you by putting you off.
Next time you’re looking for something to read - browse the non-fiction shelves. You may be pleasantly surprised, and you’ll certainly have developed an excellent mind habit.
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