According to an AP poll, one out of every four Americans hasn't read a single book in the last year. Okay, maybe I can believe that, but whenever I read articles like this, they inevitably include some guy (and yes, it is always a guy) who says something like, "I just don't have time for fiction, when I read I want to learn something."
Oh really? I re-read Huckleberry Finn this year. It's "just a story" and it wasn't even the first time I've read it. Did I really learn nothing? What I thought I'd noticed for the first time was Twain's finely nuanced description of a far-from-homogeneous pre-Civil War America—plus the eternal struggle between Huck's knowledge of what was right, according to the leading moral authorities of his time (slaves are property), and what he knew in his soul (he'd rather go to hell than betray Jim).
Nobody can convince me that making the voyage with Huck and Jim was a waste of time I could have spent learning "facts."
I saw Charles Mee's Iphigenia 2.0 at the Signature Theater Company last Saturday. Another fiction—heck, I've read The Illiad and Iphigenia in Aulos, as well as Hyginus, and all of them differ on the "facts." Yet I certainly learned something from Mee's recasting of the tale—timely thoughts about leadership, duty, and honor.
Are those lessons somehow less important than "facts"? I fail to understand this attitude.
Yeah, yeah, I'm being grumpy here. There are a lot of good reasons to read non-fiction. It's fun to learn things and understanding stuff has its own pleasures, just don't try to sell me the theory that non-fiction is "worthier" than fiction. That'll just make me think you're stupid.
