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

submitted 1 month ago by penquin@lemm.ee to c/books@lemmy.world

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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@sh.itjust.works 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.