Why we should all be reading more fiction

Betwixtmas — or Romjul, for those of you with more Nordic tastes — is a wonderful time of year to read. But not for doomscrolling on Twitter, hate-reading your secret-favourite tabloid, or even picking up that history book you got for Christmas — all this can wait. It is much more a time, I think, for getting thoroughly lost in a great work of fiction. (The only columns you should read, of course, are those dedicated to this pursuit.)

There is nothing cosier than curling up on the sofa, tucking oneself into bed, or — my particular favourite — sinking into a deep, steaming-hot bath with a good novel, to be transported to lands far away, times long gone or the minds of characters strange, sex-obsessed and sadistic. (Or perhaps that’s just me; I am currently reading Philip Roth.)

Many of you might think this sounds a little self-indulgent, and I am not immune to such concerns: my grandmother used to say that you should never read a novel before the evening because they’re “not serious things”. Male readers might be particularly prone to such thinking — studies suggest only 20 per cent of men read fiction, while 64 per cent of novels sold in 2021 in Britain were bought by women.

But novel reading is about more than mere hygge-esque hedonism. It was Aristotle himself who said that “poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history, for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular”.

Aristotle was writing before the novel had come into existence as an art form, but his argument can be applied to fiction more broadly. In a history book, a narrative is imposed on a messy jumble of events; stories are told as if they progress tidily and even rationally. This isn’t a criticism; it’s just the nature of the medium. With a novel, however, there is no such imposition: the thing itself is the narrative; there is no alternative version of the truth.

A novelist is like a magician: although they are writing fiction, they have a certain authenticity about them, because we understand we are reading something that’s not real. And as Aristotle suggests, it is this that allows the characters in a novel to somehow feel more real to us than historical figures; each represents a kind of embodiment of the human condition that we can relate to.

Many studies have found that reading works of “literary fiction” — as opposed to non-fiction or pop fiction — increases empathy and emotional intelligence. This is because the reader is exposed to a much broader range of experiences and cultures than they would come across in real life, which helps them understand that other people have beliefs, desires and perspectives that differ, sometimes greatly, from their own.

A recent study, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, found that those who had grown up reading literary fiction had “a more complex worldview” than those who had not. The authors define this as being characterised by a few factors. One is an “increased attributional complexity”: these people are comfortable with ambiguity and can understand behaviour in terms of complex systems. Another is lower “psychological essentialism” — the idea that human behaviour can be explained by certain immutable characteristics.

“Encountering difference, encountering different minds, encountering different sorts of sociality helps to scaffold this belief in the complexity of the world,” Nick Buttrick, the study’s lead author and psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells me. “If you’ve only ever encountered one sort of mind . . . and if you’re only reading . . . things which are predictable, safe, stable, people end up with a view of the world that is uncomplex, because that’s what you get repeatedly reinforced with.”

The study echoed another from 2013, which found those who read literary fiction had a lower need for cognitive closure — the desire to remove ambiguity and arrive at definite conclusions even if they are incorrect or irrational.

In a world so teeming with polarised politics, anything that can contribute to building more complex and nuanced worldviews should be embraced. So I hope to have convinced all you life-hackers and productivity gurus that you can’t actually “hack” the benefits you get from reading a great novel.

But I am also partly writing this column as a reminder to myself to read more of them — this year I have managed only six. Next year, I am going to aim for one a month, minimum. Perhaps I will even allow myself to read them in the daytime on occasion. Because they are actually very serious things, Granny.

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