After a long hiatus, I’ve started reading regularly, once again. I joined goodreads, partially as a way to track “My List”, and found out that it was an effective replacement therapy for a linkedin/social media/hacker news addiction. While trawling through my friends’ lists, I found a lot of nonfiction. This, combined with this urge to learn something useful with my reading habit, made me turn to nonfiction. I’ll tell you what books I am reading. One of them is quite racy- “The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature”. The Red Queen is a motif from Alice In Wonderland. The “red queen” refers to an environment where you must constantly run forward to be able to stay at the same place. The book’s thesis is thus- evolution is not merely adaptation to a static environment, but a competition with other agents who are also evolving. It goes further and says that the main competition is with members of your own species- both of the same gender, and the opposite gender. Interesting thesis, juicy bits like “Courtly love is about passing wealth to sons so they can be successful adulterers, cuckolding heiresses” and controversial ideas. I’m sold. Fun read. There’s just one little problem. This is supposed to be nonfiction. Is any of this accurate?

I’ve always had an aversion to nonfiction.

A part of the reason is silly. Just as I make fun of those students who study regularly (while inwardly wanting to become like them), or laugh at those who go jogging (while wishing for the stamina for running a marathon), or snigger about people who take the pains to think about style and contrast in clothing, and high quality footwear.. [Caution! Don’t blow your cover!], I also used to think that non-fiction readers are not fun and too serious.1 before I became one of them.

But there is another part of the aversion, which is driven by logic. Nonfiction can be about Evolution (The Red Queen), Success (Outliers), Business (The Personal MBA), Finance (One up on wall street), Economics (Freakonomics), History (Sapiens), Food (In Defense of Food), and so on. I find all of these interesting (in no particular order), but I have no formal background in any of these. As a result, I might take everything at face value, and will not be able to detect untruth. While reading nonfiction, the same concept is usually hammered upon so many times2, that you will eventually agree with the author’s viewpoint, by default. Because the author is frequently a journalist, and a skilled writer, you’ll eagerly devour the prose, enjoying the tantalizing nuggets and the feeling of knowledge. Because I don’t scrutinize nonfiction like I would a research paper- attacking every sentence, highlighting and adding rude questions, fighting to convince myself that it is correct, with nonfiction, acceptance is the default. So I run the risk of gathering a lot of incorrect information, or opinions disguised as knowledge. This is what scares me about reading nonfiction. I’m not saying that nonfiction is wrong, but that it might be, and if it is, you will probably not know the difference.

People I know (hello आजी) have argued that fiction is dangerous, that people become immersed in fantastic worlds, and carry ideas unsuitable for the real world back when they return3. I beg to differ. I think we humans are clever enough to separate explicit fiction from explicit fact. But I fear for our abilities to separate fact from fiction.

Knowing that nonfiction is unreliable, reading a textbook seems better (and believe me, I have tried), because that will have gone through more rigorous scrutiny from academicians (who I will trust over other groups). But reading a textbook as leisure is not fun. I like reading Computer Science textbooks, but I am a Computer Scientist by profession (believe it or not, in a few days I will be deemed to be a Master of Computer Science).

I want to learn about things other than CS. “I’m interested in anything that requires thinking” (I’m also interested in things that don’t require thinking). Because reading textbooks from k different areas takes a lot of effort, nonfiction/popular science has become a shaky middle ground that I hesitate to, but sometimes do tread upon.

This is also why I found Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and Soul of a New Machine so cool. (both Pulitzer winners in nonfiction). In one, I had to reason through the ideas presented, sometimes so much so that it made my head hurt. The other was more of a story, and the author was not trying to say “Microkernels are better than monolithic OSs because [insert some “early man used microkernels for thousands of years and that’s what we are built for” joke here]”.

So what do I do? An effective way to educate myself about evolutionary biology, health, economics, finance, history, psychology and philosophy would be to put in the effort and read good textbooks. This will not be a source of entertainment (although Learning Is Fun, and unironically so). This will be reading that I will do to properly understand a subject. So far, I have read parts of Psychology Applied to Modern Life and Overcoming Gravity. At the same time, I will read nonfiction, but I will not try to “apply the knowledge that I gained” from it. Nonfiction is for amusement and for impressing people in conversations.

Chekov’s Gun. In the beginning of the post, I said “I’ll tell you what I’m reading” but never did. Here’s a nonfiction listicle, without epistemic status.

  1. Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: An elegant fugue of math, music, AI, art, with self-reference as the central thread. Dense chapters interspersed with fun dialouges between Achilles and the Tortoise. Never finished this one, but this got me into Computer Science, and for that, I’m glad.

  2. A Random Walk Down Wall Street: A personal finance book that makes sense. I have always had this nagging suspicion about the stock market- if the price is based on sentiment, then why even look at the fundamentals? This book says, “sure, technical analysis seeems stupid, but guess what- fundamental analysis isn’t great either!”. Introduces the “firm foundations” and “castles in the air” theories, and gives a wonderful analogy to explain why some mutual funds outperforming the index says nothing statistically significant about their superiority.

  3. The Soul of a New Machine: Young, ambitious, overworked, underpaid computer engineers racing against time to build a computer in a skunkworks project in a computer company of a bygone age. Very inspiring, a delight to read.

  4. Atomic Habits: For once, self help with some concrete advice that sometimes works.

  5. In Defense of Food: Interesting ideas about the way food should be grown, cooked, and consumed eaten that would make my parents very happy.

  6. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: A cooking technique book that talks about cooking concepts instead of listing out recipes, and gives advice instead of hacks, tips, and tricks. The show, too, is so good.

I’d love to hear about what you have to say about this!

  1. I no longer judge atleast 2 of the other 3 things. ↩

  2. A friend said this about Sapiens- Yes! I get it! Agriculture was a mistake! The plants domesticated us! How many times will you tell me this? Fair point, but I still liked Sapiens a lot. ↩

  3. Sounds like Hero of a Thousand Faces huh? ↩