Why Do You Not Read Non-Fiction?

At my science fiction book club meeting this week, I learned a surprising fact: the other three guys in the group rarely read non-fiction.

We’re all middle-aged Gen Xers and we’ve been doing this book club every month for about a dozen years. I followed up, asking them why they don’t read any non-fiction and then wondering how many non-club books they read.

To answer my own questions, 2022 has become the Year of the Memoir. Starting with Dave Grohl’s memoir in February and going on up to now with Matthew Perry’s book, I listened to about a half dozen memoirs. They’ve been a nice change of pace from my normal non-fiction selections which are mostly history written by historians. Most of them, including Grohl, Perry, Steve Martin, and Ron and Clint Howard have the audiobooks narrated by the people themselves so that’s an added bonus.

On the regular non-fiction side of things, three books stand out. The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman and Watergate: A New History by Garrett Graff got that history itch scratched while James Clear’s Atomic Habits served to give me a template to help my daily life.

Beyond the non-fiction, I’m almost always reading another non-club book. That’s where my mystery love is served. In fact, I’m following up my first Leslie Meier book (Back to School Murder) with another seasonal offering: Turkey Day Murder. Throw in magazines, short stories, and a ton of news items and I’m basically always reading something.

One of the guys mentioned he reads about 1.5 books a month with the club’s SF book always one of them. He just prefers fiction to non-fiction. Another literally has a stack of books on a bedside table but just doesn’t seem to get to them. His excuse: “too much streaming.” My wife is an avid reader herself—she probably read a book a week in 2021—but her pace slowed this year partly as a result of watching instructional YouTube videos on jewelry making and gemstones so she can improve in her jewelry-making business.

One huge reason why I get through so many books is that I’m an avid audiobook listener. I get to listen to a book while in traffic, dusting the house, or going to Trader Joe’s. That does lend itself to having more time to read other things when I’m actually holding my Kindle or a physical book in my hands.

And maybe that’s the key. Maybe it’s as simple as audiobooks filling in the gaps of time when we have to do other things—grocery shopping, driving to and from work, cleaning the house—and we can’t sit and read a book. Because sitting and reading a book is and has always been wonderful.

But these anecdotal facts got me to wondering: how much non-fiction do you read?

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova

I think it’s safe to say we all admire Sherlock Holmes’s brain, reasoning ability, and sheet intellect yet shy away from his more esoteric qualities like tobacco and drug use. When we read Holmes’s adventures, we see ourselves as Dr. Watson, the common man so to speak, who can’t fathom Holmes’s techniques ahead of time but the truth becomes crystal clear after the great detective reveals his methods.

Well, Maria Konnikova, PhD in psychology, is here to say that you and me, indeed each of us has, within ourselves the capability to train our minds to think like Holmes. For even Sherlock wasn’t born Sherlock Holmes.

The key quality in all of her remarkable book is that Holmes has “a method of mindful interaction with the world.” To make Konnikova’s point more succinct, Holmes was always in the moment. He didn’t multitask, but devoted his entire brain to the problem at hand. True, he lived in an era without smartphones, the internet, television, and all the other media glaring at our minds and eyes for attention, but he lived in arguably the most advanced town of his time. As did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who created Holmes. We, too, can train our minds and our attention to interact with our modern world in a manner such as Holmes.

Like the modern version of Holmes in the BBC show “Sherlock,” Konnikova uses Holmes’s own comment about a mind attic as the basis for how we can train our brains. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock calls it his mind palace, the place where he stores all the information in its own specific place. It’s an ancient technique developed by the Greeks, but in the age of Google, perhaps the need for our own mind attics has lessened. Not so, says Konnikova, but with a caveat. You see, our mind attics are only good if we know where to find a piece of information and can retrieve it. But, as a point she makes late in the book, as long as we remember where and how to retrieve a piece of information—even if it’s on Wikipedia—we can retain the knowledge. So, is Google our collective mind attic? Maybe.

In recent months, however, I’ve begun not to reach reflexively for my phone if I can’t remember a fact I know I have learned. I give it five minutes or so, often spending a good minute trying to pull the data point out of my brain before I move on to a different task. Little did I know that technique—Konnikova calls it mindful distraction—is exactly what Holmes often did. She uses various scenes and quotes from the canon to illustrate a point, like this one from “The Red-Headed League.” Mindful distraction—where you take your mind off the immediate problem and focus your conscious mind on a different task—relegates the problematic thought to the subconscious. More often than not, the solution will manifest itself. It’s a rush when I actually remember the data point without resorting to the “source of all truth.”

Konnikova’s book is chuck full of examples of how to think differently, coupled with research and examples you can do yourself. Some are a bit more difficult when you listen to the audio, like I did, but nonetheless worthwhile. What’s especially good is when she lays out a regimen of how to retrain the brain. As 2018 is only eleven days old and I’ve already begun mindfully reading the books on my bookshelf, I think, too, I’ll work on my brain. It is, after all, the main reason I bought this book on New Year’s Day…2014.