‘What’s that doing there? It’s disgusting. I’d never eat one of those.’ The man in the queue in the café pointed at a vegan pasty, to him an outrageous imposter in the pasty world. He reminded me of a person I came across recently on a website about books who proclaimed, almost aggressively and certainly with an air of dismissive superiority, that they never read fiction.
And that reminded me of my friend Alan. Alan was as sharp as a honed blade, so sharp his words could wound. And they often did, something that didn’t endear him to some. Yet I liked him from the moment I met him. He was acerbic, knowledgeable, and funny. Like many of the people I knew growing up, his was a smartness that had little to do with academia and more to do with what he read. Yet he never read fiction.
I didn’t know this till we were both in our mid-twenties, when I showed him a novel I thought he might enjoy. He waved my recommendation away with a revelatory, ‘I don’t read fiction.’ When I asked him the reason, his answer was a straightforward, ‘Why should I waste my time with something that isn’t real?’
Apart from being shocked, I also bristled at an arrogance which implied I was somehow a lesser being because I did read and enjoy fiction. It’s an attitude that raises its head on a semi-regular basis.
Why people don’t like fiction
AI gets first billing on Google searches these days, so let’s start with the bot’s view.
AI suggests that ‘It can be difficult to understand: Fiction can have many layers, and it may take multiple readings to fully understand the meaning.’
Lacking the ability to imagine a fictionalised world is a common theme among people who write about not reading fiction. Academic Leah Henricks observes that she finds reading fiction hard work because, ‘…at times I find myself altogether unable to place myself within those situations that others find so immersive.’
Similarly, cultural historian and author Hannah Rose Woods states, ‘I continue to struggle with an imaginative leap into a world that is entirely not my own.’
Is there a link emerging? The passions of both lie in worlds where facts are more important than creativity. This also applies to Theologian Phylicia Masonheimer; although one of her reasons for not reading fiction is slightly different: ‘Nonfiction – biographies, historical accounts, newspapers and some magazines – offer information that is directly applicable to life, conversation, and relationships.’
The last is interesting because I’d argue the soul of many good fiction novels is found in the life, conversation, and relationships within. Recently we were shown around Wells Cathedral by a knowledgeable guide. She brought the ancient bricks alive because she did something that fiction tends to do more than non-fiction, she focussed on the lives of the people who built the cathedral rather than those who commissioned it or preached in it. By doing that, it brought the past to vivid life and made it more relevant.
History is a good example for any fiction/non-fiction debate as historical fact itself is often highly subjective. Generally, there’s usually a huge amount of research involved in writing fiction. As well as the pleasure I get, I also constantly learn from fiction. Recently, I found out from A Brief History of Seven Killings about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley and also Eric Clapton’s racist outburst at a concert in Birmingham, neither of which I knew about previously. In Memoriam deposited me in the trenches in WWI and made me think differently about the role of soldiers from Britain’s more privileged classes. A while ago, The Passenger revealed the level of antisemitism in pre-war Germany that should have had the klaxons going off elsewhere. The Sweetness of Water introduced me to an aspect of slavery in the U.S. which had never crossed my mind before – people trying to come to terms with newly found freedom at the end of the Civil War. Each of these were not only thought-provoking, they also tackled historical events through the eyes of people who are usually too ‘small’ to make it into history books.
Then there’s the escapism angle.
Another common theme that occurs in reasons why people don’t read fiction is they are unable to find the same levels of escapism in novels as people who do. I don’t have any studies to back this up, but I suspect this occasionally has something to do with class and upbringing.
The harder someone’s life is, the sweeter any form of escapism can taste. The gold miners of Wanlockhead in Scotland had little money, yet many of them invested a significant amount of what they had to subscribe to a library because the books within offered them relief from the harsh reality of their lives. Their imaginations were their escape tunnels.
The man in the café wasn’t angry at the vegan pasty, he was angry at what it represented, something he didn’t understand. The person who belittled fiction possibly did so because it didn’t make any sense to them. So what? A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics won’t mean anything to me. I’m not going to beat myself up about that.
Fiction or non-fiction, it’s not a contest. What’s more important is people continue to read books.