For most of my adult, working life, I’ve been a nonfiction person. Business books, biographies, self-help, behavioral science, productivity frameworks, I ate them all up because I felt like my leisure time should be teaching me something. Every page had to have a takeaway. I kept notes (and I have referred to those notes), highlighted passages on my Kindle, and I have handed books with dozens of Post-its to colleagues before.
And then, sometime in the last year something shifted. I started reading more fiction. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. I still read plenty of nonfiction, but I crave fiction. And there are important benefits of reading fiction that make me happy to add more of it to my life.
My Gateway Drug Books
It started because of a friend. Erica Reinig is writing her first novel and it’s a hefty, richly built fantasy that’s still in its first draft. I didn’t know what to expect. Fantasy isn’t a genre I would have reached for on my own. But from the first chapter, I was completely absorbed in the world she was building. The characters, the rules she’d invented, and the conflicts were interesting. I found myself devouring it and disappointed when she hadn’t finished a chapter yet.
Per Erica’s suggestion, I read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir on vacation last year. I could not put that book down. It’s quite popular right now given that the movie starring Ryan Gosling just came out in March. It was so delightful that I instantly turned to Weir’s The Martian next.
Books with More…Sensibility
I was reminded by another friend of how much I love Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, which is a far cry from deep space science fiction. In fact, despite being a self-proclaimed nonfiction-only reader, my favorite book, that I’ve read well over 15 times is, in fact, Pride & Prejudice. There is just something extremely satisfying about the story and the characters that draw me in every time. (Especially Elizabeth and Jane’s snarky father.) I also loved Austen’s book, Emma, about a charming do-it-yourself matchmaker who ends up (surprise, surprise!) falling in love herself.
So, I followed the lead of another friend and joined the world’s largest society dedicated to a single author: The Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). I started to read her other novels: Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. I read all four this year, back to back, and they were an absolute delight. Austen is so witty, in a way that somehow never fully registered when I thought of her as a classic author I was supposed to admire. These books are damn good and I wonder why I’d never picked them up before?
Books Dripping with Creativity
And then there was Matt Haig who wrote The Midnight Library, an incredibly creative book about being given a second chance. So then I picked up How to Stop Time and liked it even more. Then The Life Impossible, each book different and more creative in its setting, story, and world rules than the last.
The Midnight Train, is his brand-new 2026 novel that is a companion to The Midnight Library. It “follows Wilbur Budd, an 81-year-old bookshop owner on the brink of death, who boards a magical train that allows him to revisit the important events of his life” and then it kind of goes off the rails. This one was more predictable than the others, but had a nice message that I really took to heart. Haig has a gift for making you feel things you didn’t know you needed to feel, and for reminding you of truths about being human that you somehow forgot you knew.
These books (fantasy, Regency comedy, contemporary magical realism) have almost nothing in common on the surface. What they share is the thing I didn’t know I was missing: the experience of disappearing completely into another world and the experience of living through someone else’s emotions.
What I’ve Discovered About What Fiction Actually Does
I read more when I read fiction. When I was a committed nonfiction reader, I’d read for a while and then I’d stop to think, or take notes, or look something up, or get distracted by the application of what I’d just learned. Fiction doesn’t do that to me. I just keep going. I read more pages in a sitting and more books in a month than I ever did before. Because many of these are true page-turners and they are highly entertaining! The reading itself has become the pleasure rather than a means to an end.
I also don’t take notes. There’s something freeing about consuming a book without any obligation to extract and retain. I can just be in it.
But here’s what really got me thinking: the research on what fiction does to your brain is remarkable, and it maps almost exactly to what I’ve been experiencing without realizing it.
Fiction builds empathy. A 2013 study in Science found that participants who read literary fiction performed better on empathy tests than those who read nonfiction. The mechanism is essentially that fiction places you inside someone else’s consciousness: inside their fears, desires, mistakes, and moments of grace, in a way that builds your capacity to understand other people in the real world. Austen’s novels have taught me more about the social performance of insecurity than most behavioral science books I’ve read. Haig’s characters have reminded me how fragile, brave, and complicated ordinary people are.
Fiction reduces stress significantly. A 2009 study by the University of Sussex found that reading can reduce stress levels by up to 68%, surpassing activities like walking or drinking tea. I believe this completely (I also strongly believe in drinking tea whilst reading). There is something about the act of being transported into a story that disengages the part of your brain that’s cataloguing your own worries. You simply aren’t there for a while. And when you come back, things often feel less urgent than they did.
Fiction helps you sleep. A Sleep Council study found that 39% of people who read before bed reported better sleep. Fiction specifically works better than nonfiction here, because it doesn’t reignite the problem-solving part of your brain. You can close the book and actually rest.
Fiction may protect your brain long-term. Research has found that regular readers have a 23-month survival advantage, and elderly readers who read books for an average of roughly four hours per week have a 20% reduction in mortality risk. Reading also appears to build cognitive reserve that offers some protection against dementia. This is not a small thing and I don’t believe this just applies to fiction. Fascinating!
Fiction teaches you about being human. This is the benefit I find hardest to quantify and most important. Reading fiction activates brain areas tied to empathy and social cognition in ways that reshape how we understand other people. It’s not just that you learn facts about the world. You practice inhabiting other lives and experience things you’ve never experienced. You understand motivations you would never encounter in your own small circle of experience. Elizabeth Bennet taught me to be more open to where other people (especially hot, rich men?) are coming from. Wilbur Budd on his magical train made me think about what moments of my own life I would want to go back to. These aren’t lessons in the nonfiction sense. They’re something more like wisdom.
On Reading Human Writing in an Age of AI
We are living through a moment when AI is generating text at a scale that would have seemed like science fiction five years ago. I use AI in my work and I think about it a lot. I coach leaders on how to adopt it intentionally. Certainly, I am not anti-AI.
But when it comes to fiction, I want to read human writing. Not because AI can’t produce anything worthwhile (it certainly can!) but because fiction, at its best, is an act of emotional transmission. It is one human consciousness reaching across time and space to put something true inside another human consciousness. The reason Austen’s irony still lands 200 years later is that she was a real person who observed real people with real frustration and affection and found a way to put that observation into words that carry the feeling to us intact.
I don’t want AI to do that. When I find out AI wrote a novel, or is talking to me on the other end of a phone conversation, I feel…lonely. I want to interact with other humans through their words and writing, not machines, no matter how good those machines become.
Matt Haig wrote on his website: “If your instinct is to write then you are a writer. If it is to just make tons of content in as short a time as possible you are just a useful tool for shareholders.” There’s a difference between writing that comes from something real and writing optimized to look like writing that comes from something real. Fiction, more than any other genre, is where that difference shows up most clearly.
So I’ll keep reading human fiction like Erica’s fantasy novel, when she finishes it. And whatever else crosses my path that was made by a real person trying to tell the truth about what it feels like to be alive.
That turns out to be quite a lot of books. I’m not running out of things to read anytime soon.
What fiction have you read recently that you loved?
