Why Reading Fiction Makes You a Better Thinker
🔍 Key insights
Fiction as Cognitive Training – Reading novels isn’t passive entertainment; it’s an active exercise in perspective-taking. Inhabiting characters’ minds reduces the defensive filtering we apply to direct arguments.
More Content Than Ink – Unlike nonfiction, fiction carries no explicit thesis. Its meaning emerges slowly, through unconscious processing — ideas surface days, weeks, even years after reading.
Great Books Grow With You – Rereading a novel at different life stages isn’t repetition; it’s a new experience. What you missed at 15 reveals itself at 35, shaped by everything you’ve lived in between..
📚 Go deeper
📖 Further reading:
How Fiction Works – James Wood – A literary critic’s anatomy of the novel: what makes a character feel real, what a telling detail actually does, and why realism is more complicated than it seems.
Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky – A confrontation with the darker, contradictory corners of human psychology.
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley – A story about creation, responsibility, and suffering that speaks directly to modern debates on AI and ethics.
🎧 Podcast to listen to:
Anyone Can Enjoy the Classics: Here’s How – A Mug of Insights (Robin Waldun) – An episode tackling why classic literature feels intimidating and how to develop the reading skills to actually appreciate and fall in love with it.
💡 Think for Yourself
If you’ve only ever read nonfiction, what perspectives are you structurally unable to access?
When a fictional character unsettles you, what does that discomfort reveal about yourself?
☁️ Thought Experiment
You meet someone who has read a thousand books but never left their hometown, and someone who has travelled the world but never read a novel. Who understands humanity better?
Cheers,
Kevin