“X is acting like Voldemort. Voldemort level evil. Literally 1984.” What are you a child?
If someone brags about reading for status but only reads fiction, their knowledge is useless in practice. Fiction can be great, but treat it like junk food, enjoyable but not real world wisdom
I feel like calling fiction “junk food” is more than a little insulting to fiction. I’m not saying its a substitute for knowing irl facts obviously but it’s certainly not “junk”
Its not all junk but, like most commodities, a large chunk is junk. Same goes for non fiction of course.
Ive never been a fan of the liberal take that all book reading is inherently good. Its weirdly focused on a specific format, to the point that some novels considered classics today might not have been considered “classics” (in this framing) if they weren’t intentionally moved from a serialized format to a novel format. reading newspapers, magazines, instructional materials (text books, etc), even general non fiction in some circles, seems to be considered less important or “cultured” than reading novels. I guess poetry is usually included in the elevated status but short stories often aren’t ime.
The actual problem of course isnt that fiction is inherently bad or junk. Even if all fiction was junk would be fine. the problem happens when people use a fictional framing to fully understand the world around them rather than actually engaging in the world around them more directly to actually get some semblance of understanding. To OP’s example, Harry Potter fans that avoid reading other works (even other fantasy works) then use HP as a world framing, even as analogy, are borrowing a liberal, racist, TERF idealistic worldview from a (now billionaire) author and lazily applying it to everything.
In that sense, fiction can be junk.
100%. I think there’s certain information that you need in order to understand things like history and politics that can only really be found in non-fiction literature.
Fiction is awesome and I wouldn’t want to live in a world without it but we all need to eat our vegetables at a certain point. If reading just all by itself somehow made us wiser than we could read instruction manuals and end up just as aware and informed as somebody who has read the complete works of Marx and Engels back to front.
We should strive to try and keep a healthy and diverse diet of information just as we strive to keep a healthy diet of food, and that has nothing to do with like, policing what is and isn’t art (never a fruitful conversation to have anyways, art can be anything for all I care).
Yeah greek mythology was mostly fiction, and still is referenced aplenty in the works of most of our beloved socialist revolutionaries.