One should stop reading fiction at 30

This post on 2Blowhards reminded me of the following boutade by Josep Pla:

Quien lee novelas, después de cumplir los treinta años, es un perfecto imbécil.

That is: "those who read novels after thirty are perfect imbeciles".

I have always thought that there is something perverse going on with fiction, and that Plato did the right thing when he kicked the poets out of the Republic. To feel attached in any way to a character you positively know doesn't exist is, in fact, obscene. Compassion, for example, is a very scarce good that should always be directed at actually existing unhappy persons, of whom there is no shortage. People who cry at movies should be flogged.

Reading fiction... to renounce oneself for hours on end, exposing one's mind to be parasited by those beings called "characters", that gain a phantasmal pseudoexistence at our expense. They stimulate us with banal emotions and intranscendent visions, trying to rob us a maximum of our life, to delay the moment of again becoming dissecated nonentities shrouded in the pages of a book.

And that brings me to another pet peeve of mine: Don Quixote. Whenever someone tells me he has finished reading that book, I know for sure he doesn't take literature at all seriously. Because, what is the first chapter of Don Quixote but a dire warning against the dangers of reading fiction?

You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to reading books of chivalry with such ardour and avidity that he almost entirely neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillageland to buy books of chivalry to read, and brought home as many of them as he could get. But of all there were none he liked so well as those of the famous Feliciano de Silva's composition, for their lucidity of style and complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he often found passages like "the reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty;" or again, "the high heavens, that of your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert your greatness deserves." Over conceits of this sort the poor gentleman lost his wits, and used to lie awake striving to understand them and worm the meaning out of them; what Aristotle himself could not have made out or extracted had he come to life again for that special purpose.

(Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote)

I long to meet a discerning person who stopped reading at that point, so we can finally have an informed discussion about the book.

In fact, writing this post has prompted me to action. I will embark on an ambitious program of desintoxication from fiction. I will start small, however. From now on, everytime someone tells me a funny story, I will withhold laughter until I have been positively assured that the story is based on a real event, without any substantial embellishments. Only then I will laugh. A laugh of hilarity, and also of relief.