Do you feel guilty when you read fiction some times? Do you feel like it’s a frivolous pursuit? Sometimes, I do, because I’d think to myself “might as well watch a TV show”, and I hardly ever watch TV shows because, to me, they’re a waste of time. But damn it, some of these novels are so good and I can’t stop once I started reading them.
I have been reading books since I was about 12 (43 now), and I can probably count the fiction books that I have read on my fingers. Does that make me a nonfiction reader? I have just started reading fiction a while ago, and not gonna lie, I have been enjoying :)
I guess “basically only nonfiction” makes you a “nonfiction reader”, but I think most heavy readers read at least some mix of types.
I’m guessing nonfiction is ~10% of my 1400 books on goodreads, with probably 80%+ being mystery/suspense/procedural police/whatever you want to call anything like that.
That 80% is all over the map within "mystery"
between hard boiled detective, light cozy mysteries with witches or ghosts, 600 pages of really believable characters with interior monologues, a one man army ripping a criminal conspiratcy to the studs one body at a time, exploring Victorian era magic systems with political upheaval within story to story magical murder mysteries, just goofy characters doing goofy stuff in the course of a bounty hunter collecting skips, whatever.
OK, that went off the rails a little. What I was getting at was that seeing how different people tell stories and how they explore characters has some overlap with my nonfiction about what makes people tick. I read for characters and how people create them, and think that I’ve learned things from that, too.