Reading improves your social life?

I picked up the June issue of the New Scientist to discover that reading improves your social life.

The article by Keith Oatley declares that the novel “is a kind of simulation of the social world … just as people’s skills as pilots improve when they spend time in a flight simulator, so people’s social skills should improve when the spend time reading.”

At the University of Toronto, through several in-depth experiments, they concluded that fiction readers could identify much better with other people. Not only that but people actually went through changes in personality after reading fiction as against non-fiction!

“Fiction is written in a way that encourages us to identify with at least some of the characters, so when we read a story, we suspend our goals and insert those of the protagonist into our planning processes.”

So here’s another great reason for us to spread the reading habit. It creates a better people and a better society. As a fiction writer, that’s a particularly wonderful to know.

I also wonder what it says about a society that doesn’t read much fiction?

Thought #58

Why do we only appreciate our health when we’re ill?

The Vanity of Writing

I recently read an article by Jane Goodall who was frustrated with a particular literary genre:

“… the Bookers just aren’t doing it for me any more. The truth is I don’t like the writing. It’s brilliant, of course, but the better it is, the more I hate it. Sometimes I hate words, words in themselves, words that draw attention to themselves in the vanity of writing …”

I like that expression, “the vanity of writing”. She of course does not mean that the writing is futile but rather she is referring to the excessive pride in the creation of the words. These are the words that gleam and soar brilliantly above the page even as the reader frowns trying to make sense of the sentence!

Jane Goodall would much rather read a novel with a good plot. For her, good writers are good storytellers:

“Storytelling is a tradition surely as ancient as human speech and, if our oldest mythologies are anything to go by, suspense is always at the heart of the matter … [yet] a combination of influences have served to almost eradicate the plot from high-end fiction and, along with it, most of the technical apparatus belonging to the art of suspense.”

However a good section of readers will affix themselves to the literary novel. The beauty in the words are paramount, the story is incidental.

I am rather promiscuous in my own reading diet, moving from genre to genre without any loyalties.

What kind of books do you like to read?

Winter

Winter silently slips our loved ones into slumber …

Their seasons have gone as they’ve climbed the mountain, sometimes strolling, sometimes crawling, often climbing vertical cliffs. Surveying their life and the seasons they’ve left behind, snow like a cold carpet lays beneath their feet.

Inside, they are still that joyful child of spring, the confident adult of summer, the older person of autumn. In these shortening days, they feel the chill of the remaining days. Some loved ones are already slumbering. To those held in fear or in pain; love and strength I wish them for their remaining days. No one wants to leave but life is about letting go and the cherished memories they leave behind.

As I tread through my autumn days, I know winter is not so far away.