Why read literature?

What with the endless pandemic and the horrors in the headlines, lately I’ve often turned to reading to escape. Mostly it’s been easy reading: mystery novels or best sellers. But now I’m finding that it’s not enough: I can’t keep living just on this fast-food reading diet anymore. I need to get back to the kind of fiction that engages your whole mind and soul: good quality novels, the kind we call literature.

What sort of book qualifies as literature? It has to be of high artistic quality, well constructed and well written. It addresses themes that have universal appeal and stand the test of time. The characters have depth and complexity, and their interactions ring true. Good literature still speaks to us, still has new things to tell us, no matter when and where it was written.

It takes effort and attention to read literature, but it’s a great cognitive workout for our aging brains. We get to spend a long time inside the minds and societies of other people, including people who may not be like us. We deepen our understanding of people’s emotions and desires, and feel empathy for them. We develop an appreciation of differing perspectives, motivations and values. We watch competing values come into conflict with each other, sometimes with no easy resolution, and learn to weigh them against each other. We resist the temptation to draw conclusions too soon. Reading literature requires us to slow down, take in a lot of information, and then change our minds as we read, sometimes reassessing our own long-held beliefs. We strengthen our powers of insight and imagination. We see that the world can be different from the world we know.

When selecting novels from this genre, we don’t need to be too choosy; any literature will do. Skip the best sellers. Here are some suggestions for finding titles:

• Check lists of prize-winning books: the Giller prize, the Governor-General’s award, the Booker prize, or books by authors who have won the Nobel Prize for literature
• Pick titles from Penguin Classics
• Review book lists from literature courses. You can find some at sites such as Bibliomania
• Ask a librarian for recommendations