• 46 percent of U.S. adults can’t understand
the labels on their prescriptions;
• 50 percent of U.S. adults are unable to
read an eighth-grade-level book;
• 33 percent of U.S. high school graduates
will never read a book after high school;
• 42 percent of college students will never
read a book after they graduate.
My disappointment deepens when I read of
studies showing that a person’s ability to be empathetic increases through
reading.
Is
this connected to the increasingly vitrolic and mean comments we read online?
Do these voices showing hatred, seeing the world in black-and-white terms and
failing to allow for the complexity of other human beings reflect the dearth of
reading?
In her article “Reading as a Form of
Therapy” (newyorker.com), Ceridwen Dovey refers to a study in 2013 in Science
that found that “reading literary fiction (rather than popular fiction or
literary nonfiction) improved participants’ results on tests that measured
social perception and empathy, which are crucial to ‘theory of mind’: the ability
to guess with accuracy what another human being might be thinking or feeling, a
skill humans only start to develop around the age of 4.”
But what is literary fiction? Some would say
it’s elitist, snobbish, hard to understand, an arbitrary label. Wikipedia
defines it as “works that offer deliberate social commentary, political
criticism, or focus on the individual to explore some part of the human
condition.” I would add that it generally presents characters that are complex,
not one-dimensional or predictable.
Dovey refers to Keith Oatley, a novelist and
emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, who
has for many years run a research group interested in the psychology of
fiction. He says: “We have started to show how identification with fictional
characters occurs, how literary art can improve social abilities, how it can
move us emotionally, and can prompt changes of selfhood.”
Dovey writes about her experience with a
bibliotherapist named Ella Berthoud, who asked her about her reading habits.
After several sessions, conducted via email, Berthoud recommended a list of
books for Dovey to read.
She worked her way through the books over
the next couple of years and gained some insights. “In a secular age, I suspect
that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that
elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks,”
Dovey writes. “Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same
time makes me feel most uniquely myself.”
Dovey
calls bibliotherapy a “broad term for the ancient practice of
encouraging reading for therapeutic effect.” She traces the first use of the
term to a 1916 article in The Atlantic Monthly, “A Literary Clinic.” The
author refers to an early bibliotherapist who says: “You must read more novels.
Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching,
drastic, stinging, relentless novels.”
Bibliotherapy is not a panacea, and not
every reader is necessarily empathetic. Yet regular readers sleep better, have
lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than
nonreaders.
