My sons are annoyed by my refusal to read fiction, but without telling them, I may read...

[NNadir]

...Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française

...Born in Ukraine, Irène Némirovsky had lived in France since 1919 and had established herself in her adopted country's literary community, publishing nine novels and a biography of Chekhov. She composed "Suite Française" in the village of Issy-l'Evêque, where she, her husband and two young daughters had settled after fleeing Paris. On July 13, 1942, French policemen, enforcing the German race laws, arrested Némirovsky as "a stateless person of Jewish descent." She was transported to Auschwitz, where she died in the infirmary on Aug. 17.

The date of Némirovsky's death induces disbelief. It means, it can only mean, that she wrote the exquisitely shaped and balanced fiction of "Suite Française" almost contemporaneously with the events that inspired them, and everyone knows such a thing cannot be done...

New York Times Book Review Suite Française

I sort of have to read it, but I won't tell by sons, since I'm trying, hard as it is, to be consistent.

[FSogol]

1. What? Why don't you read fiction?

I love to mix novels in with all the nonfiction stuff I read. I couldn't go a month without reading fiction.

[NNadir]

2. Many years ago, in a time I think of as being dead...

...I read massive amounts of fiction.

Something in me then wasn't quite alive. Frankly if I met my 25 year old self, I'd despise me.

Now I am running out of time, and there's too much to learn on the way out the door. I have no time for invented lives, real life is too exigent.

As that now very old man Bob Dylan put it, "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."

[FSogol]

4. Umberto Eco on Why Unread Books Are The Most Important

https://fs.blog/2013/06/the-antilibrary/

Edited to add: The real world is overrated.

[NNadir]

5. In some ways I agree with the sentiment.

I do have, for a man of my means, a rather large library, and a much larger electronic library,, but the most important unread books in my estimation are technical books, not fiction.

I am working working on organizing and sharing what I have learned before I die, sometimes frantically, and other times in a lackadaisical fashion.

I do not recall that I ever read anything by Umberto Eco, though a very long time ago I saw a movie based on one of his novels. Medieval history and philosophy is not necessarily my cup of tea.

[Dan]

3. I read the review - and I think that it would probably be a good read.

While you may no longer read fictions - there is a book called "The Kindly Ones" about the German army or at least an Officer in the German army. While it states that this book is a work of fiction (based on the age of the author Jonathan Littell), I have often wondered if the tale of this book was shared with him by someone directly involved in the atrocities of that late great war.