The average American reads at an eighth-grade level.
This statistic is no surprise to many. The fact that many cannot read at an adequate standard is the norm in the nation. And in the contemporary world, most of this engagement is academic: to perform, inform, and advance. Essays, reports, emails, curated snippets of news are our predominant form of reading.
Rarely do we read to inhabit another consciousness.
When was the last time you tested the limits of your imagination or confronted truths uncapturable by fact alone? Reading fiction, often dismissed as escapist, is one of the most rigorous exercises of the human intellect and imagination. To neglect it is to forgo a training of the mind and heart that little can replicate.
What, then, accounts for our collective drift away from fiction? Part of the answer lies in the economization of attention. We increasingly read for extraction: takeaways, summaries, and arguments we can deploy.
The novel resists this posture. It cannot be skimmed without loss. It demands time, patience, and vulnerability. To read Middlemarch or The Brothers Karamazov is to submit oneself to a slow moral education.
More modern works echo that same understanding — that fiction is a laboratory for the human psyche. William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice confronts us with the morally unthinkable. Morrison’s Beloved forces a reckoning with historical trauma and the persistence of memory. Through narrative, we access the interiority of thought and emotion.
Fiction cultivates what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum called “narrative imagination,” the capacity to understand the lives of others. Our brains simulate the perspectives of characters, allowing us to inhabit mental states foreign to our own. We apprentice ourselves in the art of human understanding without sentimentality. It is an intellectual discipline, crucial for anyone navigating a pluralistic world. Formation of the moral imagination lays the groundwork for understanding without surrendering conviction.
In a culture trained to ask, “What do I get out of this?” fiction replies, “You will be changed.”
Moreover, fiction acts as a mirror. Through characters’ struggles, we encounter our own fears, contradictions, and latent potentials. Raskolnikov’s moral torment in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment provokes reflection on conscience. Clarisse in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 reminds us that attention to beauty is itself an ethical practice. Fiction permits moral rehearsal, sharpening discernment without real-world cost.
Fiction also cultivates creativity, a faculty increasingly endangered.
Exposure to narrative worlds stretches cognitive flexibility and cultivates imaginative fluency. Creativity, in turn, is the engine of innovation and adaptive thinking in every domain. Reading fiction is therefore an intellectual necessity, a gymnasium for the mind.
Paradoxically, fiction illuminates truth through fictionality. By exaggerating or reshaping reality, stories reveal structural patterns and moral dynamics obscured in quotidian life. Flannery O’Connor described fiction as “truth told in a way that opens the eyes of the reader.” Literary narratives transform abstract ideas — justice, sacrifice, suffering, redemption — into concrete experience. Truth, here, is experiential.
For Christians, fiction carries additional resonance. While Scripture provides narrative and theological truth, imaginative literature often mirrors these realities in unexpected forms. With no fiction of its own, it’s no surprise that the biblical text is conveyed through many genres.
And that is because reading widely and empathetically trains the soul to perceive complexity and moral depth. While the Bible is not fiction, literary devices are meant to evoke something out of us. This resonates with the imaginative and ethical formation that Christian life calls for. Fiction, in this sense, forms intellect and spirit.
People neglect fiction and, in so doing, accept a thinner life. A populace untrained in narrative is more susceptible to caricature and propaganda. Without practice in holding complex characters together — heroes who fail, villains who ache — we become brittle interpreters of real people. We default to outrage or dismissal.
This is especially urgent in an age of spectacle. When outrage cycles dominate discourse, fiction reasserts the primacy of depth over immediacy. A novel unfolds interiorly, beyond the reach of algorithms. It cannot trend into the superficial. It must be entered. And in entering it, the reader learns again how to attend. Attention, Simone Weil argued, is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Fiction trains its capacity.
Children today will likely meet cruel enemies. That much is true. But so will adults. As C.S. Lewis said, “Let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”
None of this requires elitism or obscurity. One need not begin with Proust. Start with The Hobbit, or Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Read something that invites wonder, sorrow, or recognition. What matters is a depth of writing from a novelist that respects the reader enough to unsettle them.
A society that reads only to operate struggles to understand itself. So read fiction as a return. Return to the slow work of understanding selves and others. Return to language. Return to stories that remind us, as Tolkien did, that even the smallest acts of faithfulness matter in a world shadowed by darkness.
Pick up a novel. Open a short story. Immerse yourself. Laugh, weep, marvel, and wrestle with the interior lives of characters at once alien and familiar. In doing so, you are practicing the faculties that define our humanity. Read more fiction. It will change the way you see the world.
