How Reading Fiction Can Shape Our Real Lives 🅑🅸🅾🅖

I started college in the fall of 2003 when I was seventeen years old. I’d spent the last year dissecting news articles with my AP Government class on the U.S.’s escalating tensions with Iraq.

War had moved beyond theory and into inevitability yet I didn’t know how to express my horror and had even less of an idea of what to do with it. Then, six months after the first time the U.S. invaded Fallujah, I read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

In this award-winning novelization of his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War, O’Brien tells the story of Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon. Rat and Curt are best friends—inseparable—until the moment when, during a game of catch, Curt steps on a hidden landmine and dies instantaneously.

The abruptness of the incident and its placement in the middle of a scene of languor tells one kind of truth about the arbitrariness of war. But what struck me most—what motivated me to find out what I could do instead of merely understand is the scene that comes after.

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The narrator, who is also a soldier in Curt and Rat’s unit, tells the reader that shortly after Curt’s death, they stumble upon a baby water buffalo. Rat strokes its nose—and then shoots it in its right front knee, its back, twice in its flanks. Piece by piece, he tears the buffalo apart.

The narrator tells us:

Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up to me afterward and say she liked it… That as a rule, she hates war stories… but this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad… What I should do, she’ll say, is put it all behind me. Find new stories to tell.

I won’t say it but I’ll think about it… You dumb [expletive].

Because she wasn’t listening.

It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.

The most straightforward and simplest way of acquiring these skills is reading books. Though there are some other ways to acquire these skills as well, the most important one is your exposure to the world.

And reading books does give us this exposure and we can learn a lot of things about the world.

But when it comes to reading books, there is a general assumption that nonfiction plays a better role in skill development than fiction.

It is also said that fiction is all about escapism and is just a waste of someone’s precious time. It takes us into an imaginary world that has nothing to do with the real world. Fiction can be a good time pass but it doesn’t help us to develop and understand the world.

Do you believe this? 

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I DON’T believe this! Literally, I can NEVER believe this! It isn’t true at all!

By calling fiction mere time-wasting stories or time pass, some people strike off its importance. There can be no denying the fact that nonfiction is a gateway to facts and knowledge. But, at the same time, we can’t underrate fiction. It has been of great importance since the dawn of humankind. 

There are so many benefits of reading fiction that I can’t cover them in a single blog post. Still, I’ll try my best to do so!

What are the Benefits of Reading Fiction?

Several types of research conducted on the benefits of reading fiction, however, suggest that when people read literary fiction, they are able to develop social cognitive abilities, theory of mind, and critical thinking. In fact, reading fiction may provide far more important benefits than nonfiction.

Though reading nonfiction might certainly be valuable for factual information, it does little to develop emotional intelligence, an ability only developed through reading fiction. 

Reading fiction is a powerful way to understand others, enhance emotional and practical intelligence, and understand the world. It is interesting that the imaginative worlds of stories provide us with so many opportunities for self-improvement. 

Here are some amazing benefits of reading fiction that will surely surprise you.

Why Read Fiction?

Let’s look at the novel Frankenstein, written in 1818 by Mary Shelley, and on the great-books list of many colleges. If you have not read this tale recently, you may have forgotten that Frankenstein is not a monster, but a young man who is impatient to seek out the secrets of the universe.

He believes he has found the key to generating life from studying science. To test his theory, he collects body parts from morgues and dissenting rooms, assembles an eight-foot creature, and charges it with life.

When the dull yellow eyes open, however, Frankenstein is appalled by what he has done. He abandons the creature, which is scorned and attacked wherever it goes. It becomes enraged and ultimately kills Frankenstein’s brother, his bride, and his best friend.