I'm a big fan of non-fiction, and I am a believer that fact is much more exciting than fiction.
The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.
I use non-fiction work written by Whites in my research. It's indispensable. That wasn't the problem. I said that "The Wire" was a cliché! It's like my writing a series about Jewish life and casting all of the characters as inside traders.
I've just finished reading 'The Second Plane,' and I think it's some of the best non-fiction I've ever read.
We are living in an era of such interesting new forms, and certainly narrative non-fiction has emerged as a major form. People who are great writers don't have to write novels anymore.
Read history, works of truth, not novels and romances
I read science books, chemistry books, history books. I read that stuff for fun.
In fact, people seem to be tired of fiction now. There are so many other ways of exploring humanity - by ethnology, psychoanalysis, and so on. It's a little boring to make up stories. So many people think that it's better to be very close to reality and to recount one's life as it is rather than to fictionalize, as they say, that is to transpose, and therefore to cheat.
I lay off a lot modern fiction and only rely on living writers for non-fiction work.
Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever.
I prefer non-fiction to fiction. In fact, I don't read fiction at all. I read books that are based on true events.
I tend to listen to music more than I read. I need to get into reading a bit more. The stuff I tend to read is usually non-fiction books more than fiction, but I've been trying to power my way through Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I do enjoy it.
I've always felt that no one understands why some books of non-fiction endure and some don't, because there's not much understanding among many non-fiction writers that the narrative is terribly important.
