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Coda said:Fiction is better for one reason. To me, nonfiction is always so..textbookesque. What experience I've had with it was boring. True, yes, but boring.
Hear, hear!GreenKnight said:But I get cross - no, I get livid - with people who look down on fiction slightly, and consider 'factual' books somehow superior. This seems to be missing the point in a spectacular fashion.
Reading a book should not always be about 'finding out something new'. What would be the purpose in that? Reading is about living. Fiction allows one to experience emotional and spiritual journeys that one would never have been able to undertake - never could have imagined taking - otherwise. They allow expansion and growth of that mysterious spark inside you that you call 'yourself'. Fiction is, in a very real sense, life itself.
I think questions of autobiography are always misleading because every writer uses themselves in their work, they use their own experience, they use what they observe, hopefully they use what they can imagine but perhaps thats less frequent than it ought to be. But really autobiography tells us very little. What we should be looking for is authenticity: if this comes from the centre of the writer, if it comes from a real place in the writer then that will show itself in the work. And I think its authenticity we should be looking at, not autobiography. Theres only so much the autobiography can tell us. But at present we are obsessed with writers lives, with what we think of as true life, with what we think of as the real story. There is no real story, the real story is in the fiction.
I also read non-fiction stuff but it`s not the same!nwberenyi68 said:You read fiction to stimulate your brain and open up whole nother worlds that you would never think of before. Its also a plus that it entertains you.
Sitaram said:The essential quality of such personal, subjective interpretation and deconstruction or analysis is that it becomes mine, my discovery and insight, and is no longer a passive experience but an active one, where I am the doer and not simply the observer.
But then, such experiences require much labor and preparation. Whenever we actively experience fiction, as opposed to being a spectator passively beholding, then the product of our experience, our insight, becomes non-fiction.
So, as the particular kind of reader that I am, I convert fiction into fact, and I convert fact into drama. A reader may be a kind of machine in these respects.
abecedarian said:Non Fiction is one tool to use to learn about the world around us, and fiction is a way to discover and explore truths about ourselves.
Because I experience reality every single day.So why do we read fiction?
I think the tie between humans and fiction goes all the way back to creation. We've always used stories to convey truth, whether to children or adults. Non Fiction is one tool to use to learn about the world around us, and fiction is a way to discover and explore truths about ourselves.