The Importance of Reading Fiction
My journalist friend, Shubhasree Desikan, made a perceptive comment on a blog I had posted on Medium, “A Hero’s Journey (Nov 19, 2022),”: “Reality is a pale shadow of fiction — a contrast to the usually held view… perhaps the very complexity of life dulls the impact of character and the comparative simplicity of fiction sharpens it like a cut gemstone adding to its lustre.”
This is an acute observation about fiction. Fiction allows you to assume various identities in different circumstances, which is a great luxury denied to you in your paltry real-life existence. Fiction is a great simplifier enabling abstraction. It discards the non-essentials and highlights what matters. Events that take years, in reality, are distilled into a few chapters. Changes that take place over the years — the evolution of a relationship, the emergence of a crisis, the dissolution of a character — can be seen in a matter of hours. Reading gives you a broader perspective and makes you understand the absurdity of the world. Imagined lives are more colourful than real ones because imagination transcends knowledge and embrace the world as a whole.
In Abraham Verghese’s “Covenant of Water”, Philipose explains to Ammachi about his reading the Moby Dick: “I’ve lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab…
