Saying Goodbye to Nonfiction

Since I graduated college, my reading diet has been primarily nonfiction. What’s the point of fiction, right? I’m here to learn as much as I can, and that means optimizing for facts facts facts.

My book selections are dictated by my current interests along with what books people have given me. Across both categories, a fair number of books take me months to finish. I’m a pretty slow reader, and I do a lot of things with my free time other than read books. And books themselves represent just a small portion of my overall reading; I probably spend at least twice as much time on newsletters and blog posts, along with a lot of podcast consumption.

Some books never get finished. Not many, but some¹. More often, slow books drag on for over a year but I finish them eventually. Walter Isaacson’s Innovators and Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder are fall into this category. They’re not bad books, but they’re a slog.

I’m tired of always having four books sitting around and feeling like it’s a chore to finish them. It’s gotten me thinking more deeply about why I read nonfiction.

One of my favorite mantras is about media consumption: “If it doesn’t make me happier and it doesn’t make me smarter, then I’m not interested.” That view has led me to drop many TV shows over the years, most notably Breaking Bad.

And while nonfiction books pass that test on the surface, I’m starting to feel like they’re not a particularly good way to make myself smarter. Sure, there are exceptions. But generally these books are not as information-dense as their natural substitutes: online summaries, Wikipedia pages, blog posts, etc. And they’re certainly not making me happier! Most long nonfiction books do not sit on the efficient frontier of the happiness/smarts curve.

I’ve been genuinely wondering if part of my motivation to read nonfiction is to be able to claim “oh yeah, I’ve read that one” when a book comes up in conversation. There’s no cultural reverence for your habit of reading 20 newsletters, but someone who knocks out a book a week is clearly a scholar. I’m not saying this attitude is sensible – it’s completely wrong – but it’s real. I’d like to untether myself from it.

Long books, in particular, almost never pencil out in terms of being worthwhile. I can read hundreds of online articles in the time it took me to finish Thinking, Fast and Slow. And honestly that book really could have been reduced to a hundred pages without losing much relevant information.

Low information density is a common theme. I suspect that authors feel like readers won’t pay full price for a book that’s “too short”. And they might be right! But we end up with so many long books that should have been short (TFaS), and short books that should have been a blog post (Atomic Habits).

One particularly good example of an inflated book is Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain, a 500-page brick about the opioid crisis. There was so much history in it that I didn’t need to know in order to better understood the present.

My guess is that journalists in particular have strong incentives to pad out their books. Journalism is not a wildly lucrative career, so when a story you broke actually becomes news, it makes sense to try to cash in as much as possible with a book². (The same can be said about academics – see again Thinking, Fast and Slow.) But as the reader, I hate this! I just want to know the important details, not everything you learned along the way.

Meanwhile the authors of major nonfiction books often go on book tours, and in these interviews they basically spill the beans on everything interesting in the book. They give you an hour of what they think is most important, without all the fluff. Why read the book after they gave you all the same information, more efficiently!?

The answer, I guess, is because you want to be able to say you read the bestseller that’s currently dominating the zeitgest.

I don’t know exactly where this thinking will take me. There are specific categories of nonfiction that are clearly worthwhile, like tech books that cover specific tools. But in general, I think consuming nonfiction isn’t helping me reach my goals, and I need to accept that I’ll be smarter if I let go of them and the cultural cachet they come with.