People on here say that you should only read factual books, be it autobiographies or self-help and stay away from fiction.

The goal of reading is not just to aquire knowledge. A self-help book is very inefficient at aquiring knowledge. Most self-help could be summed up in a few pages and usually bulked out with fluff (in order to justify the book). Ironically they've almost always been written somewhere in condensed form online. Read this shit, you'll become boring.

Google is far cheaper, quicker and up to date.

Biographies tend only show a side that they want you to see (there are exceptions of course as this post makes a lot of generalisations). There's also nothing that will take away the fact that they are usually shit boring writing.

Now take blood meridian for instance. Every sentence is designed to create images in your mind and each paragraph merges those images into a flowing meditation of grusome horror. As you warm up, you get absorbed into the writing, your mind speeds up your comprehension of these images, your mind's eye see's a dream of increasingly realistic qualities. It has experienced colour, texture, smell, emotion, and coupled it with reasons and motivations and social interaction that on some levels is extremely realistic, if not real. It may teach you life lessons while your being entertained. TV or film is extremely slow compared to literature.

Not only that, read regularly you'll come across as an intellectual mother fucker.