Reading novels and expressing feelings

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Hi there,

aspies are believed to not like reading novels, they prefer non-fictional stuff. I wonder why this is the case in detail. Do they miss anything? the emotions? Why don't they enjoy it so much?

And my second concern is: Most aspies have problems expressing their feelings to others (its called alexithymia). But in novels feelings are expressed, thus might it help an aspie to read many novels such that he can also improve his ability to express feelings?

Has any aspie ever read many novels? Did it improve his skill to express feelings to others?

best regards,
anton

I'm an aspie, and I enjoy reading novels, as do many others. I'm not sure who's under the impression we don't, as a group. As far as expressing emotions, I know of at least one aspie who uses fictional characters as templates of a sort to know how to interact with people and express complex ideas, including emotion. Not sure how common that is, though.

I've read several hundred works of fiction already, not just books, but plays and poems as well. And that is not even taking into account the fan-fiction I quite regularly read on the internet. I have also read a lot of non-fictional works; all in all those might amount to a similar mass of printed letters.

Most of those works of fiction I read before I was aware of my having AS and back then I only thought I enjoyed the stories the books were telling me (and that certainly was and is true). Looking back, however, I have come to realize that I have picked up a lot of knowledge about how social interactions work and how to make sound assumptions about other peoples' emotions and motivations, so I think my reading so much was also some form of self-therapy helping me to find my way around with other people.
What's even more impressive for me is that my "reading balance" shifted quite heavily towards non-fiction over the last two years as if my subconsciousness had decided that there was very little social knowledge left to gain from works of fiction. And I would say that my social interactions have stabilized and not developed much further since about the time that shift set in. I don't know which of these two effects is the cause and which is the consequence, but I think that there is a connection between the two.

I have no idea where you got this information, but it is just about perfectly wrong in my experience.

I personally don't particularly enjoy reading fiction. I just don't find it interesting enough. I'd rather spend my time and energy reading and learning interesting facts.

I got really tired of reading when I was in college and after I graduated I started kind of avoiding reading long texts like entire books. Having cut down on reading so much, I rather use what patience I have left for reading on something that I really enjoy or that I find useful in some way. Fiction just doesn't qualify.

I did read fiction a lot as a kid and teenager, but I don't think that taught me anything about expressing my feelings. I think my issues with expressing my feelings are related to people being too dismissive of my feelings in the past. Whenever I tried to express my feelings people would either not listen or they would dismiss my feelings as silly, unnecessary, strange or uninteresting. Being either ignored or punished for expressing them, I learned to just keep them to myself.

Literature is one of my special interests and what I obtained my degree in, so I may be biased. That said, from the people I know and the conversations I have taken part in on WP, the idea that "Aspies don't like fiction" just sounds really wrong.

Most of what I read is technical because it's part of my special interests - but recently a work of fiction almost became a special interest in its own right.
Go figure...

And I can't see the connection between "aspies are believed to not like reading novels" and "Why don't they enjoy it so much?"
(my emphasis)

Dunno where this stuff comes from...

Care to share?

Oh, I suppose it's nothing particularly clever, in the grand scheme of things: the trilogy "His Dark Materials", by Philip Pullman.
It just pulled me right in and reading it felt more like experiencing a detailed dream.
I've read it over and over again and still want to read it again, just for that immediate feeling of detailed familiarity I got the very first time I read it.

Reading fiction has been one of my interests since childhood. I can understand the social interactions and emotions between people in books because they are often in the 3rd person and I am given much more information than if I were thrown into a situation in real life.

I don't think it has helped much. I thought eye contact and facial expressions were things that only occurred in novels to help form emotions in text and/or that they were more important in novels and had no significance in real life at all.

I also read nonfiction.

Yep. I see it that way too, because an interaction is laid out in detail by the author at the point of experiencing it.
How unlike real life, where things are a bit more hit & miss.