Book Blogger Hop: Fiction or Non-Fiction?

This prompt was submitted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer:

What is your reading preference – fiction or nonfiction?

I’ve unintentionally taken a couple of weeks off, thankfully, this is an easy way to come back—because it’s essentially crunching a few numbers. By Non-Fiction, I’m including history, biography, autobiography, memoir, humor collections, essays, science, literary/film criticism, theology…eh, pretty much anything that’s not in the 800s in the Dewey Decimal system (and even some of it). With Fiction, I’m including novels, novellas, short stories, children’s picture books, and comics/graphic novels (other than things like Maus and Persepolis).

It helps that I do a year-end table (and monthly for a while now, too) showing the breakdown by genre, so it didn’t take too much work to tweak it into a Fiction vs. Non-Fiction Graph.

If you ignore 2012 (and I don’t know what I was doing there with only 10% Non-Fiction), I average out at 21% Non-Fiction, 79% Fiction. I’d like to think I read more Non-Fiction than that, but honestly, I’m happy it’s that much.

On second thought, that’s not what the question asked, is it? The question wasn’t “What do you read more of?” was it? It was “What is your reading preference?” There’s little better in the world than a well-written Non-Fiction book. I’ve re-read The Right Stuff and The Last Chance to See innumerable times—ditto for The Big Picture by A. Whitney Brown. The books I’ve listed in Just a Spoonful of Sugar—Non-Fiction to Smile With and Learn From* are a real pleasure to read. A well-written biography is dynamite. And so much of the theology that I read does more for my heart and soul than my mind. I could go on here, but I guess I’m trying to say that I love reading a good Non-Fiction book.

* An updated version is due in a few months, but I’m giving myself a chance to add a couple more entries to it first.

Now, I did say “there’s little better in the world than a well-written Non-Fiction book.” Chief among that “little” would be a well-written novel. My preference is definitely fiction—my practice reflects my preference.

The danger in writing these Book Blogger Hop responses in a pretty stream-of-consciousness fashion is that it ended up taking me 421 words and a bar graph to get to the point rather than saying, “Fiction,” and moving on.

What do you want for nothin’? A Rubber Biscuit?

What about you—what’s your poison?