We all read books in general and fiction in particular for a variety of reasons. We read to be challenged, informed, entertained, inspired, educated, edified, and so forth. And reading can accomplish those goals and more. British author Neil Gaiman once observed in a lecture that reading fiction can provide us with another benefit that we don’t consciously choose but that is no less ours to receive.
Gaiman is the author of novels, graphic novels, and children’s and YA fiction. You might know him for his novel American Gods, which was adapted for American television, or his comic book series The Sandman, which has also been adapted for television. I have read a few of his stories, including his novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane, where I noted some similarities between that story and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. With that limited exposure I can say that his work tends to be dark, but it also contains some themes that can resonate with followers of Jesus.
On October 14, 2015, Neil Gaiman gave a lecture for The Reading Agency, a British nonprofit organization with a vision “for a world where everyone is reading their way to a better life.” An edited version of the lecture appeared in The Guardian the following day. It’s worth the few minutes it will take to read the entire piece, but it came to my attention because of one passage:
[T]he second thing fiction does is to build empathy. [The first is to serve as a gateway drug to reading.] When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
You’re also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this:
The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.
Neil Gaiman, Lecture for The Reading Agency, October 14, 2015.
So enjoy that novel, that short story, or even that comic book, and receive from it the benefit that you intend to receive. You just might find yourself ever so slightly changed in another unexpected way when you reach the end.
© 2022 by Pat Walsh