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Nonfiction readers. Do you feel guilty reading fiction? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Do you feel guilty when you read fiction some times? Do you feel like it's a frivolous pursuit? Sometimes, I do, because I'd think to myself "might as well watch a TV show", and I hardly ever watch TV shows because, to me, they're a waste of time. But damn it, some of these novels are so good and I can't stop once I started reading them.

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[–] conciselyverbose 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What qualifies as a "nonfiction reader"? Sometimes I'll read 5-10 nonfiction a row; sometimes I'll read 100 fiction in a row.

But no, I read whatever I feel like when I feel like it. Though fiction I'll usually read a series from start to finish where possible.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I have been reading books since I was about 12 (43 now), and I can probably count the fiction books that I have read on my fingers. Does that make me a nonfiction reader? I have just started reading fiction a while ago, and not gonna lie, I have been enjoying :)

[–] conciselyverbose 3 points 1 month ago

I guess "basically only nonfiction" makes you a "nonfiction reader", but I think most heavy readers read at least some mix of types.

I'm guessing nonfiction is ~10% of my 1400 books on goodreads, with probably 80%+ being mystery/suspense/procedural police/whatever you want to call anything like that.

That 80% is all over the map within "mystery"

between hard boiled detective, light cozy mysteries with witches or ghosts, 600 pages of really believable characters with interior monologues, a one man army ripping a criminal conspiratcy to the studs one body at a time, exploring Victorian era magic systems with political upheaval within story to story magical murder mysteries, just goofy characters doing goofy stuff in the course of a bounty hunter collecting skips, whatever.

OK, that went off the rails a little. What I was getting at was that seeing how different people tell stories and how they explore characters has some overlap with my nonfiction about what makes people tick. I read for characters and how people create them, and think that I've learned things from that, too.