How Much Do We Need to Read to Have a Chance to Be Good?

One good way to investigate what causes that feeling: experimentally truncate a good story before the point where its creator actually ended it. Just cut it off and observe your reaction to that imposed ending. The resulting feeling will tell us something about what’s missing. Or, conversely, about what the remaining text does supply, once we read

They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.