/lit/ - Literature

I dont read fiction for precisely this reason. More valuable investing time into a Biology science textbook than a fairytale. I feel im learning more, which is why I read if not mostly for minor entertainment purposes.

The reason you SHOULD read fiction is for the satire or imaginative perspective of the human condition. The only fictions ive really read are a couple like BNE, Nausea and Crime and punishment.

>>5319665
How useful is that knowledge on Biology when you inevitably die? Everything is essentially a 'waste of time.' Might as well waste your time doing something enjoyable. I enjoy reading fiction, so I'll keep on doing that.

books don't need to be directly informative to be useful. books give you insight in situations from different perspectives. you can have a story and approach it from the side of someone who has opinions you don't share at all. it can be vary valuable experiences.

best example i can name is when i read East of Eden, i realized that religion can be helpful to some people.

>>5319672
Good point, Nihilist.

I'm a STEMfag and I only recently started to try and get back into reading. I read Dubliners and am currently working on Infinite Jest. I can assure you I've learnt more from reading these 1.2 books than any other textbook I've read during my school or college years.

well since noone else is posting the quote

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

>>5319665
>>5319672
>>5319688
Fiction, at its worst. is raw escapism. At it's best you can learn a bit about yourself. If you don't want to live vicariously, don't read fiction.

The obsession with usefulness is going to be one of the more embarrassing things talked about in our history book.

You're a bundle of electricity traversing meatspace and you have to lie to yourself daily so you don't fall apart at the neurons, yet you demand every action you make have a purpose.

You're playing the game but you didn't read the rulebook.

>>5319697
Hadn't seen that quote before. I like it. Thank you for sharing, friend.

>>5319718
Who are you replying to? No one said anything about usefulness? There is such a thing as learning for learning's sake.

>>5319703
Well said. I guess this is what I should have said instead of refering to biology book.

life without newspapers<life without fiction

that's a fact, pal

>>5319762
read the op

time is a spook and so is the concept of wastefulness

>>5319890
>time is a spook
holy fuck can you stop calling everything a spook

>reading newspapers
Do you enjoy advertisements and being lied to? I personally prefer fiction.

>>5319697
I wanna find that book.

>>5319642
Why do anything? We all die in the end.

>>5319703
>at best you can learn a bit about yourself

Or someone else. One of the most important (I'd say) things on the planet.

With the Metamorphosis, I might not be able to understand society or mankind any better. I don't even understand myself any better.

But that book, along with many other works by Kafka, allow me a glimpse into his suffering. I get to see humanity and I can know I'm not alone.

>>5319642
>>5319691

OP a STEMfag who just started reading again already has a more patrician understanding of literature than you do and he's only two books in.

You should be embarrassed.

>>5320224
>mah nigga

>>5319642
>Is reading fiction a waste of time?
Only if it contains no didacticism.

aka everything written after 1950.

>>5319665
>I feel im learning more
and that's the only difference

>>5320224
The doing of things is the reward.

>>5320224
it passes the time

>>5319642
>Is reading fiction a waste of time?
Reading modernist fiction certainly is.

Read better authors, OP.

>>5320224
Then go kill yourself.
See? You didn't

>>5320373
every piece of writing has a message regardless of whether or not the author intended there to be one. Works that are blatantly trying to tell a message are useless.

It is not a waste of time. You learn a lot about the world around you in every aspect. I can't take these threads seriously with autists like this guy >>5319665

>>5321468
Is that you Gary?

>>5321497
Lol, Steve?

>>5321468
Fiction only contains banalities every semi-intelligent person already knows intuitively. There is nothing to learn.

>>5321560
Wtf, "banalities" is not a fucking word.

>>5319697
This is pretty much what I felt when I realized that I was slowly turning into a similar useless piece of shit like Raskolnikow and the underground man. ;_;
>tfw I probably had turned into a bitter NEET without Dostojewskij.

>>5321581
How did you stop it?