Can Reading Make You Happier? | the New Yorker
On survey after survey they reported that reading and discussing works of literature had made them feel less stressed, more connected to their patients and to one another.
Suzanne Koven • Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we unde... See more
Maria Popova • The Doom and Glory of Knowing Who You Are: James Baldwin on the Empathic Rewards of Reading and What It Means to Be an Artist
Nestorus’s third and most mysterious reason for immersive reading is that sustained engagement deepens our understanding of what we read by the changes wrought in ourselves through the very process of reading.
Joel J Miller • What Monks Know About Focus
The major index of the rise in empathic curiosity was literature: fiction, drama and poetry.