The growth shelf and the literature shelf are usually treated as different disciplines. One is practical, the other decorative. One is for becoming a better person, the other is for pretending to be a smarter one. I don’t think this is right.
I read both, in roughly equal amounts, and I have come to think they are not different disciplines at all. They are different organs of the same activity. The reader who only reads one is reading half-deaf.
This essay is about what the other half hears.
What non-fiction is for
Non-fiction gives you arguments. It makes claims you can test against your own experience. Read carefully, it leaves you with positions — about how habits work, how attention works, how the economy works, how the mind makes decisions. The claims may be right or wrong, but they are claims. They have edges. You can agree with them, disagree with them, qualify them, send them to a friend.
The good non-fiction book is, in this sense, a debate partner. You sit across from it. You let it speak. You decide, paragraph by paragraph, whether it’s persuading you. The work is reasoning work. The faculty involved is mostly the same one you’d use in a difficult conversation: the part of you that weighs, doubts, and decides.
This is genuinely useful. Most of what I think about money, productivity, decision-making, and behaviour came from non-fiction books, and I would not give them back. The mind needs arguments. Without them, it drifts.
But arguments only go so far.
What fiction is for
Fiction does a different thing, and it does it almost entirely without your consent.
A novel does not present you with a proposition. It puts you inside a life. For three or four hundred pages, you live as someone you are not — someone with a different history, different fears, different reasons. You don’t agree with this person. You don’t disagree. You inhabit them. By the end, something has happened to you that no argument could have caused, because the change did not pass through your reasoning at all. It passed through your body.
I think most of what we call empathy is built this way. Not by being told that other people have inner lives — every reasonable person already knows this — but by spending hundreds of hours, over decades of reading, occupying inner lives that aren’t ours. The non-fiction case for empathy is two paragraphs long. The fiction case is the entire shelf of Beloved and Stoner and The Brothers Karamazov and a thousand other books, and it lands differently because it lands somewhere else.
The clearest illustration I can give is a Hindi play.
The play that did the work
Ashadh Ka Ek Din, by Mohan Rakesh, was first published in 1958. It is, in some ways, the foundational text of modern Hindi theatre. It is about Kalidasa — the great classical Sanskrit poet, the author of Meghaduta and Shakuntala — but it is set in a version of his early life that history barely records. Kalidasa lives in a village. He is in love with Mallika. The imperial court at Ujjayini hears of his talent and summons him. He goes. He becomes the poet history remembers. Mallika stays.
The play is in three acts, separated by years. Ashadh is the first month of the Indian rainy season — the title means one day in the month of Ashadh — and rain presses against the action. Kalidasa goes to the court. He becomes great. He returns at the end, having achieved everything he set out to achieve, and the village is still there, and Mallika is still there, and he is the one who has been hollowed out.
The play does not argue that ambition costs you something. It does not present a thesis on the trade-offs of artistic success. It does not give you a framework. It puts you in the room with two people on a rainy afternoon, and you watch them try to talk to each other across the gap that his life has opened up, and the gap is the whole point, and the gap is unstateable except by watching it.
I have read non-fiction books on ambition. Several of them are good. None of them did to me what the second act of Ashadh Ka Ek Din did. The non-fiction books left me with positions. The play left me with a feeling I have not been able to put down — that there is a version of getting what you want that is indistinguishable from losing.
I cannot summarise this feeling. I cannot turn it into a framework. It does not appear in any notes I have ever taken. But it is there, and it has been there for years, and it sits underneath certain decisions I make in a way that no argument has ever sat.
That is what fiction is for.
Arguments and company
The shortest way I can put this is: arguments reach the mind. Company reaches the nervous system.
A non-fiction book is an argument made to you. A novel is a person made available to you — not just the protagonist but the writer, watching the protagonist, deciding what to show. You read non-fiction across the table. You read fiction on the other side of someone’s eyes.
These are different transactions. They use different parts of you. They leave different residues. A reader who reads only non-fiction has trained one organ of attention and starved the other. A reader who reads only fiction has the inverse problem: a sensitivity to other lives, but no apparatus for thinking clearly about their own. The literary reader who sneers at the productivity reader, and the productivity reader who dismisses the literary one, are both arguing for malnutrition.
How to read both
The practice is not complicated.
Read non-fiction for the things you need to think about. Read fiction for the things you need to feel. Don’t read them on a schedule. Don’t alternate by chapter. Just keep both kinds of book on the bedside table, and let your week tell you which one you need.
If you are stuck on a decision, read non-fiction. If you are stuck on a person — yourself, someone you love, someone you’ve lost — read fiction. The categories will surprise you. Sometimes the decision turns out to be a person problem. Sometimes the person turns out to be a decision problem. The two halves of your reading life will tell you which is which, if you let them.
Why I’m writing both
I am, this year, publishing two books. The first is Unfold, a non-fiction book that comes out in July. It is about fifteen frameworks for thinking and living, each tested against a story from a life. The second is The Fish Can Talk, a collection of sixteen short stories, coming in August.
The reason I’m writing both is the same reason I read both. There are things I have learned that can only be argued, and there are things I have learned that can only be staged. The non-fiction book is the work I had to do for the first kind. The fiction is the work I had to do for the second.
If you only read one of them, you will miss what the other half hears.
— Akhil M Sharma
