I mostly stopped reading new (to me) fiction between 2000 and 2015 or so, barring isolated exceptions mostly for non-entertainment reasons (like grokking a genre or sampling an important author).
Conclusion: when facts are stranger than fiction, I read new-to-me fiction.
Conversation
It’s interesting that I binged Discworld through the Trump years. It’s fully realized political world-building that makes sense. Now I’m bingeing Culture.
Pre-2000 I was < 26 so really that was more just stocking up mental inventory of fiction. A kind of pleasure-plus-learning.
