I want to recommend reading natural history alongside fiction as a practice. Not as research — not looking things up when fiction mentions them — but as parallel reading tracks that enrich each other through contrast.

When I was reading Dune I was also reading a book on desert ecology. The two reading experiences were mutually illuminating in ways I hadn't anticipated. The real desert ecology made Herbert's fictional ecology more specific and more impressive. The fictional desert made the real ecology feel like it was telling a story.

The same pairing works with history and historical fiction, with science and SF, with memoir and literary biography. The non-fiction track gives the fiction a reference point that makes the fiction's choices visible.