The objection
If you are the kind of reader who gravitates toward non-fiction — business books, psychology, self-help, history — you have probably had the thought that fiction is a luxury. You have a limited number of reading hours. Why spend them on made-up stories when you could be learning something?
It is a reasonable question. Here is why the answer is wrong.
Fiction trains a skill non-fiction cannot
Non-fiction gives you models — frameworks, data, arguments. Fiction gives you something different: the experience of being inside another person's mind. Not their arguments. Their experience. When you read a novel well, you are practising the hardest human skill — understanding what it is like to be someone else — in a way that reading about empathy in a psychology textbook cannot replicate.
Keith Oatley at the University of Toronto has published research showing that literary fiction readers score higher on tests of social perception and emotional intelligence than non-fiction readers. The effect is small but measurable, and it suggests that fiction is not a break from learning — it is a different kind of learning that non-fiction cannot provide.
The books that changed how leaders think
If you need the business case: consider that Jeff Bezos required senior Amazon executives to read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day as a lesson in the cost of unreflective loyalty to an institution. That lesson could not be delivered as a memo. It required a novel — 250 pages of a butler slowly realising he had wasted his life in service to a man who didn't deserve it — because the lesson is not about the information. It is about the feeling of recognition.
Consider also that 1984 and Brave New World shaped how an entire generation of policymakers and technology leaders think about surveillance, control, and the seductive power of entertainment. No policy paper achieved what those novels did. Fiction works at a different level of persuasion — it changes what you notice, not just what you know.
Where to start if you haven't read fiction in years
Don't start with literary fiction. Start with something that has a strong plot and pulls you forward:
- Gone Girl — a thriller that will also make you think about marriage, identity, and performance.
- The Alchemist — a fable you can finish in two hours.
- The Old Man and the Sea — Hemingway at his most accessible, under 130 pages.
- The Hunger Games — science fiction that is also political philosophy, disguised as a page-turner.
Once you are reading fiction again, let yourself follow what you enjoy. There is no merit badge for reading Dostoevsky first. The goal is to be inside someone else's head for a few hours. Any good novel will do that.
The real cost of not reading fiction
A person who reads only non-fiction knows a great deal about how the world works but has a limited repertoire for imagining how other people experience it. In a meeting, they can analyse a problem but may miss the emotional dynamics driving the conflict. In a relationship, they can diagnose but not empathise. In a crisis, they have frameworks but not intuition.
Fiction builds the other half. You do not need a lot of it — one novel a month, or even one a quarter, will change the texture of your thinking. Start with anything on the list above. You have nothing to lose except a few hours of scrolling.