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Kevin comments on Fictional Evidence vs. Fictional Insight - Less Wrong
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I think that literary fiction is the best available source of social insight very regularly. I'm particularly partial to Russian Opera as the training wheels version of this actually. Science Fiction, in my experience, is much much less frequently a source of valuable insight, though Vinge's Cookie Monster provided one.
By the way, is this post obvious to most people? I can't tell if it would be obvious to most readers or not.
Literary fiction suggestions please? As a baseline for suggestions, I like David Foster Wallace's writing a lot but haven't actually read Infinite Jest yet.
And no, I suspect that most of the posters here don't read literary fiction, though they probably would if we did it in book club form. I'm game.
Try the stuff that you read in high school, but with adult sensibilities. Gatsby and Herman Hesse (not the Glass Bead Game) in particular, or more generally things with mundane settings from the perspective of the author. Joyce, comedy such as John Kennedy Toole or Dickens, probably not Nabokov.