Read more great literature!

Two recent articles focus on the benefits of reading great literature.

The first, published in The Guardian, argues that "bibliotherapy" can offer palliative effects that pharmaceuticals can't:

A tall order, but Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin would agree; as colleagues of de Botton at the School of Life in Bloomsbury their belief in the curative powers of the novel has led them to set up a formal bibliotherapy service "for life's ailments." They prescribe only fiction ("the purest and best form of bibliotherapy"), and apart from occasional excursions into the classics, concentrate on books written within the last couple of centuries. The Novel Cure is the distillation of those recommendations. "Our apothecary contains Balzacian balms and Tolstoyan tourniquets," they tell us in their introduction, "the salves of Saramago and the purges of Perec and Proust."

Some of the advice is tongue in cheek (the cure for being a shopaholic is Bret Easton Ellis's American Pyscho?), but some of the recommendations make sense.

The second article, in the Times, points out that a recent study found classic fiction teaches its readers important social skills, including empathy.

It found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking.

“Frankly, I agree with the study,” said Albert Wendland, who directs a master’s program in writing popular fiction at Seton Hill University. “Reading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people’s lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person’s position — lives that could be more difficult, more complex, more than what you might be used to in popular fiction. It makes sense that they will find that, yeah, that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives.”

Many questions still need to be answered (How long does the effect last?), but the research is promising. In the meantime, why risk being a social zero? Read more great literature!