At Leisure with Joyce Saricks: Reading to Learn and Learning as We Read.

Saricks, Joyce (author).

A few months ago, I came across a comment that got me thinking: readers read nonfiction to learn something. Though seemingly innocuous, the remark, in context, implied that one doesn’t learn from fiction. I confess it got my dander up: Is nonfiction essentially superior because it offers information, the opportunity to learn something? And is it true that we don’t learn from fiction?

I thought we’d already covered this in endless discussions of why we read and how what we read affects us. Sometimes we read to escape, sometimes to discover and learn, sometimes to be challenged, sometimes to be comforted. None of these needs is mutually exclusive, and the satisfactions can be met by a wide variety of books, fiction and nonfiction. I escape my narrow world in many types of books, from literary fiction to romances, but I might learn something, be challenged, or be comforted by the same books that provide escape.

When I was doing a workshop in northern Minnesota’s Bob Dylan country a few years ago, I spoke about appeal. I talked about “frame” as the details of the subject in nonfiction and the extra something that often forms the background of the story in fiction, such as the sideline history of Arctic explorations in Dan Simmon’s The Terror or information on sandhill cranes in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. One librarian commented that it might be better named incidental learning. And she’s right. It’s the extra “stuff” we pick up in many of the books we read, the trivia that fascinates and stays with us after other aspects of the book are forgotten. We may not read fiction to learn something in the same way we might read nonfiction to be educated, but we certainly pick up interesting factual tidbits.

Obviously, if I am in search of specific information on a topic, I’ll turn to nonfiction. However, I think readers pick up “information,” actively and passively, whenever we read. (To say nothing of the research that demonstrates the importance of the act of reading or listening to books—it’s all educational.)

For example, many of us credit historical fiction for our understanding of history. I’m certainly not going to debate the relative credibility of history versus historical fiction—my historian father-in-law would turn in his grave, and my history-professor brother would have my neck. I will argue that history is often based on opinions and interpretation, not necessarily factual data (even primary documents are often copies with interpolations), and that a novelist’s perspective is not necessarily any less accurate than a scholar’s. From my vantage, certainly, historical fiction is also a lot more readable. Sure, I’ve come upon points in historical fiction that have caused me to roll my eyes, but it’s the rare book in any field that can claim total accuracy. I’m a sucker for the story in history. I shut down when faced with a text, but I devour even the lengthiest novels if they spin a good story along with the facts.

Would CSI be as fascinating if it were the day-to-day casework of a forensics lab, checking one DNA case after another? Surely not. We love the show for its fast-paced, investigative stories, but along the way we pick up “incidental” learning from the nicely integrated details. I wouldn’t advocate that universities discard texts in teaching forensics, but few of us really plan to change careers and become forensic investigators—we simply want those bits of information that add an authoritative touch to the story.

Sometimes we read to explore personalities, in both fiction and nonfiction. Biographies and memoirs are surely among the most popular types of nonfiction written today. Our fascination with the cult of personality demands a wide range of books about the rich and famous, the adventurous, the altruistic. In fiction, too, we discover unique personalities in the genres that emphasize characters—literary fiction, for example—and in the series characters we follow from book to book. We get to know these characters and see them do the things we might secretly want to try, just as real-life people do in biographies and memoirs. Frankly, the chances of our meeting Bill Clinton aren’t that much greater than our meeting Stephanie Plum—but from books, we know a lot about what makes them both tick. And, by extrapolation, what makes others tick. We learn about people and the kinds of lives others live, and whether they’re real or fictional, we discover truths about others and about ourselves in reflection.

This desire to learn, a disease that seems to afflict most readers, also provides another way to make connections across the Dewey Divide. Like many readers of fiction, I often want to know more about a fascinating topic I’ve come across in a novel. With Regency romances I want a book about nineteenth-century Britain, or a historical costume book so I can picture the clothes, or a book that shows the carriages or describes the meals with their endless courses. When I read historical fiction or adventure, I often want a map. Fiction leads many of us to nonfiction to expand our horizons. If you don’t believe me, think back just a year or two to the explosion of books that complemented Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, fiction and nonfiction, true and imaginative. What a great opportunity to explore and promote the library’s collection!

Luckily, we don’t have to choose between fiction and nonfiction, nor do we have to make hard-and-fast rules about what constitutes “reading to learn.” If we did, we could start by reading the Editor’s Choice titles in this issue and work our way through. If this list is anything like previous ones, we’ll discover fiction with that extra dimension of incidental learning and nonfiction that invites exploration and appreciation—and that reads like fiction. What more could we ask?

Joyce Saricks is the author of Readers’ Advisory Service in the Public Library (2005).