Friendly reminder that reading fiction rots your brain and is completely useless except as entertainment...

Nabokov is the best intro to lit I think

I'll look into him. I'm specifically looking for something that would introduce me to some deep theory of mind from a fictional perspective though. Something that would help my autistic brain understand why people feel things the way they do.

Try "Lolita"

I don't want to internalize the pedo mindstate tho

>t. utilitarianist stemfag who doesn't understand the purpose of art and whose only argument is muh hippie
Enjoy being replaced by poos

Anna Karenina perfectly crystallized 19th century Russian court culture for posterity.

Fiction makes great historical and cultural artifacts, if nothing else.

Nope, not even a STEMfag, I'm just not a retard who realizes that reading a fictional story about fictional people, often in a fictional setting, is the exact same as watching the equivalent amount of cartoons on television.
As I said, that is the only usefulness fiction has, but most works of fiction aren't like that. What does "The Lord of the Rings" encapsulate? It encapsulates nothing. It is simply the daydreams and fantasies of an Englishman laid out on paper. It offers nothing useful.

That's hard because people are very complicated, and their study requires more pages than a digestable story could handle.

You're supposed to be forming that theory yourself from your reading of various authors. At the very least, the author is being explicit in revealing his or her innermost thoughts. Storytelling, like any other art, is meant to be a highly subjective, abstracted experience. This valuble because life is a highly subjective experience that we can only interface with in abstract terms: Why are we here? What's the purpose of our lives? Are women good or bad for men? Vice versa? What is good? What is bad? What is love? What is justice?

We practice art because it is a common basis with which two or more people can agree to answers to these questions.

Read Stoner, read Of Mice and Men, read the first 100 pages of The Cider House Rules (pretend it's a short story), read Flowers for Algernon. Gonna stop here, too much effort

>useful
To whom? To help you advance your career, to buy more things, to be marginally more comfortable? To help 'society'?

Faggot

>Looking at words is reading

You don't read fiction because of utilitarian reasons, you read it out of passion.
And also for investigating the collective unconscious.
Also read this.
plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-aesthetics/

I like how your post has as much weight as a tweet ended with #facts

Man who howl like wolves live in these quarters they are free of womans influence and sometimes you can see them spit out and asy "pah womman" and look grumpy and walk to the forests to do their things with each other. These mans would scratch the other mans head and say: You are a big bad wolf and chuckle and so chuckles were exchanged in this village of wolfman without womens but one day a woman appeared in the village and she was beautiful as a model from a model magazine and the wolfman gulped and made slurp noises and looked at the woman like prey at tit's victim and sneaking glances were exchanged and noddings were eenunciated and thoughts were shared telepathically and all knew what was being the guiding factor here as they eyed the girl who seemed to be a virgin full of repressed desires waiting to finally be fucked and all so the men wandered down the hills at twhich they had stood before because they had been sitting there and looked romatnically and with wolflike melancholy at the steppes stretching out in front of them so they walked down and the 10 wolfman greeted the woman and said who they were and it went as such: "I am Nicklas and it is my duty to be awake at night as to guard over our village and make sure that no intruders appear here but as my duty is peformed at night i have only woken up one hour ago at precisely 4 PM and now it's 5 PM." and "Hello my dearest maiden my name is Joshuel the Man With Great Paws and Teeth as Sharp as Kitanas it is my duty to hunt in the forests and kill the helpless dear via traps and mechanical scheemings and with my paws i hold fork and knife and with my sharp teeth i chew and so it is what i do, i take care of food for these men of mine, men whom i love more truthfully than they could imagine." and "Welcome, i am Sargoth the Alpha Wolfe of this Gang." and another said "Hallo, i am Rodriguel and stem from the wilderness of the Wastelands and my parents died when i was young when it happened i walked away from my village for bad luck and misery were attached to my being there and many parents said "No! Do not play with him again or otherwise i will spank you badly!" and so i went away after all for nobody was playing with me at the well anymore and i was sitting there containing my tears because my best friends had abandoned me for what i thought was clear to not be my fault for they died of illness a somehow i was deluded enough to think that this gave me the right to empathy from the others a thought which only my guide and tutor and my bloodfather and my hero sargoth had taught me was false and lead to my great sufferings but back then i was unknowing and not yet a wolfmale and so i wandered off and ate berries on which foxes had pissed in the forests but it was good enough and a doctor oce said that one should drink a whole glass of urine atleast once a month for the health effects it provided and so i did but occasionally i needed more whch lead me to infinite city in which i miracoulously

It should be used to expose the reader to unorthodox ideas and ways of thinking, in such a way that isn't possible/effective when just directly saying them.

>Friendly reminder that reading fiction rots your brain

thank god. once my brain rots away i wont have to read these awful threads on Veeky Forums anymore

>my retarded autistic opinion is the truth
sure thing pal

There is some truth in what you say. Not very much, obviously, but some.

I agree that most of what goes on in "literature" classes in schools and universities is a complete waste of time.

People should be taught to read and then they should be given good fiction (and particularly good poetry) to read, but endlessly DISCUSSING and ANALYZING it is mostly pointless. If "English Literature" classes must exist at all, it should be for the purpose of forcing children at a very early age to learn GOOD poetry by heart.

What SHOULD be taught - and generally isn't - is RHETORIC. The ancients realized how important this was and they studied it as seriously and scientifically as geometry.

The ability to speak powerfully and persuasively and wittily and cuttingly and soothingly and charmingly is VERY useful in life and most people just have to pick it up as best they can. Their schooling is short-changing them.

As far as WHAT to read: Yes, reading bad fiction rots the brain. But reading good fiction gives you deep truths about the world that help you organize and understand your own experiences. If you don't think so you're a moron, and I will be forced to laugh at you.

"playing the drums i am playing the drums i am playing the drums alright i am playing the drums oh yeah i am playing the drums playplayplaying the drums and electric fuzzing interferes with my brain and i am playing the drums while echelon bravo and delta killachmed and haloomi but im playing the drums the tin drums i am playing them and the nazi dance is back in style again playing the drums god damn playing the drums until the world falls apart and haloomi is dead at last and no longer hiding away in his village in pakistan protected by the tribes of the rebels and i am playing the drums playing the dreams aha playing the drums until the world is an electric grid where i can go anywhere immediately and all that is left to do is knowing where i want to go and so it will be with everyone and it will be easy because there is nothing easier than knowing what one desires so i will be playing the drums some more until there no longer is a sky because skies are superflous and they annoy the heck out of me because they hide Sun and Moon my two favourite things in the universe without a doubt + free of shenanigans while playing the drums your mother will die a painful death because all death is painful due to it not being self-contained event but a shatter in the MATRIX painful it is but passing yet painful so be prepared for the pain when the message reaches your phone, the message of a family member of yours, proclaiming with a strange tone of voice that your mother has died at last. Then you will sit in your class room and try to repress your feelings until the class is over so that nobody notices a thing because you do not wish to see that something like this just happened to you. Something shattered inside you then and your mother is dead now forever and you have no loving wife so you are alone, entirely alone only because you were such a self-obsessed dickwit knowing nothing about life and refusing to read homer and learn from the greeks and as such you were bitterly alone in your pleasant apartment while i was playing my drums, my drums in my room, my unheard drums but nonetheless played, played until there no longer was anybody who could potentially listen to them but nonetheless played, me playing my drums until it was outlawed by Chanseuse Merkel, head of our glorious state, to play drums anymore as to keep the state functioning and Keep What We Have foreverial and without disturbances most importantly without the rhymths of my tin drum but nonetheless i would still play my drums and when i'm dead the echoes of my drums will be heard in outer space the waves never ending as far as my education reaches, never fully consuming their energy but being part of some great orgasmic universal movement of will, the Big Drum being played and my drum being played playing into it until there no longer was poetry or prose but only things to actually educate yourself like history, philosophy, theology, science and math etc. Then people would say: ALL fifict

OP is creating an excuse to not read fiction, as if every fiction was bad because of Don Quixote and Harry Potter

Not all fiction is retarded, OP.

I don't really care though. I read what I like fag boy

Thats more than enough wouldn't you agree? i said to my father who was shit talking at ficture and i said: stop with it now or i will shoot you in the head and i pointed my gun controller at his head and he said: This feels as if you were grabbing me at my throat and he let his newspaper fall to the ground in fear and said: Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and then added criticisms of his to this proclaiming that there was too much banality or too much dickwaving and then settled down in Arizona with his new wife after my mom had died a painful death and there he was growing weed legally and listened to Weed Rap dailious with his new wife while i was living in San Tamonica in Ro-Mania a village outside of sanfran in Cali in the US of A down the street from the Wall street where cigarettes were fuming in the coldness of the Winter Storm which had evacuated all citizens from the outside back into the insides and being heated there and drinking tee in demonstrative manners, proving to themself and rightfully so the pleasures of being in a warm place while it was cold outside except for my friend who had a hysteric laugh attack when he was hearing his family praising the warmth inside and the exquisite feeling of togetherness with a television to look at other people and the whole world while it was blizarrding outside so my friend who'se names were manifold but whom i called Jacques ran outside and stripped naked in violent also demonstrative manners from his clothes and ran through the snow and started freezing to death and said to the world but nobody heard him: This is the truth. This is the truth. The Blizzard is the truth, he exclaimed and died minutes after that. Not many people cared and the least cared his family about him who was well educated in the homeric works and knew of the dangers of those who did not heed the advise and of the elders which manifested themself in the mass society of our times as a very profound and all-encompassing network of normative rules and such a hasardeur as jacques was unwilling and unfitting or as to say it in a tonge fitting our times he was real as fuck and that was not a great loss and in many ways the president of the united states felt relieved when the news was delivered to him because it meant less of a hassle for the institutions of the state who were trying with all of their power to finally domesticate this barbaric, incontinent piece of shit creature man which my god if you could only just have a glance at the abyss that opened up when they were sexually aroused you would clearly deny having any worth or justification of existance and if you only studied teir existance for moments on the internet and used all the input you got from actually existant people and not the fictional idealizations of so called artists, you would realize that we would be better of if more people realized the truth and ran outside of their homes to die stark naked and stop being an embarrassment to the whole family cons

What if I don't care about the real world?

I just want to establish one thing before this thread goes any further. Say what you will about the "usefulness" of fiction (I read it a bit sparingly myself), but it is just simply not true at all that reading a book- ANY book- is the same as watching cartoons on television. Reading can be entertainment in the same way that television is. But reading is an active entertainment, while television is a passive entertainment. Reading engages the brain in a way that watching television cannot. There's a reason that a person who reads a lot- whether they are reading fiction or nonfiction- is at less risk for Alzheimer's than a person who watches television a lot. As for what is best for your mind, what matters the most with reading is how challenging the book is to your brain. The more you are having to make an effort to understand the contents of the book, the more rewarding it is going to be to your mind. So something like, say, Ulysses, would likely be "better" for your brainpower than a book for first-graders about how trees grow, EVEN THOUGH the book on how trees grow may contain more "practical" information. But yes, reading fiction is better than watching cartoons if your goal is to exercise your brain. If your goal is to exercise your brain AND fill it with something a little more all-around useful, non-fiction is your best bet. But I have to admit that OP's "muh soul, muh hippie dippie new age bullshit" comment made me wince. Because come on, OP, you can do better than that. We're not talking about chakras or something here, nothing supernatural. You know what he means by "soul."

...

I get what you mean, but I guess what I mean is, I want a novel that best represents the mind of an upper middle class college educated normie, since those are the people I interact with the most. What fiction book is written from the normiest of the normies in that regard?

>Too much of a brainlet to read anything longer than a few lines

I think we now know who's truly suffering from brain rot

>doesn't feel like reading the autistic ramblings of a butthurt litfag on Veeky Forums
>"durrr you're a brainlet"

Man, I miss smoking cigars...

I didn't read your post but it was a little long could you shorten it or something thx

What do you do for fun user?

Well then why haven't you killed yourself?

Dumb thread.
Good literature is the only thing that gives us a true understanding of the world

Face it my boi you have no argument against this ()

Well that’s just like, your opinion man.

Aristotle in his Poetic says that there's more philosophical value in fiction that in history because precisely its fictional nature allows us to think of the world in more profound ways. Poetry speaks about "how things should be"

Reading fiction exposes you to human relationships even if you rarely talk to people.
It's been proven that it indirectly keeps you sociable.
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=753778B351C73B7B8950A3A352E5DD88?doi=10.1.1.502.9329&rep=rep1&type=pdf

>history
>philosophy
>theology
>science
>math
But, OP, those are fiction. The only truth is found in what you call fiction.

>drums
you say?
youtube.com/watch?v=qWabhnt91Uc

There are events and eras that can only be dealt with through fiction. No book on Chancery Court in Victorian England or London debtors' prisons can ever be as vivid or comprehensive as Dicken's Bleak House or his Little Dorrit.
No historical studies can do justice to post revolutionary French society as Balzac's Human Comedy series.

OP didn't respond to you because he doesn't see an opportunity to attack. Inflammatory thread is saged.

God, that is the worst kind of reaction GIF, the kind that "XD so sassy!" SJW girls use on Twitter or Tumblr

Le OP, you make a great point, but I simply cannot agree with you. Your observations on the validity of written werds is well founded, but it is clear that you haven’t properly thought it trough. Clearly, philosophy books are still just books, and al books pale in verakity when compared to the sublime art of filmography. Why would I care about the opinions of a philosopher who’s probably dead when I could be lerning from the greatest minds in history, and stimulating both my auditory and visuatory cortexes.

This video is a much gooder explanation that I could ever provide: youtube.com/watch?v=fzcBnUky5yM

Books will help you improve those spelling and grammar abilities

> you now realize that fiction readers on Veeky Forums are like metalfags on /mu/

Sorry to break it to ya, but now we see who the smart people are. And it's not people trying to fit into a 'scene'

No offense but you can take your fantasy reading nerd culture and shove it up your not-talking-to-females asses. This is Veeky Forums, not reddit.

>nonfiction is just shit you might need for a job or literal garbage data
Yea because non fiction is just textbooks and 250 page pop history books

>theology

Shut up, you're not the boss of me.