I must admit — I was a book snob.
I rarely read fiction because I believed it couldn’t teach me anything. Fiction was strictly for leisure.
When I wanted to understand something, I read non-fiction to learn whatever it was I wanted to learn.
Well, that approach to learning is wrong because reading fiction can teach you a lot.
For example, in the novel Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane, you learn a lot about the relationships between communities and the race relations in Boston in the ’80s. You also learn how this one working class community talks, behaves, thinks, and deals with problems.
I learned a lot of sociology from this novel and I found it down in the crime thriller section.
Another novel that has a lot of social science in it is Red Rising by Pierce Brown.