I recently tried to suggest a friend read Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem, and it was fascinating how much of a struggle it was to come up with a convincing argument to read such an extraordinary book. The best reason I could come up with: “It has such cool world-building, and the characters are so dramatically different than the ones in most western fiction novels… you have to read it, man.” It was an endorsement that pales in comparison to the incredible experience of reading the book. I wondered why it’s so easy to talk about and recommend non-fiction books while it’s impossible to capture the essence of good fiction.
Fiction is fundamentally irreducible. Whereas non-fiction is easy to summarize into a few key points, the narrative structure of fiction makes that impossible. If you attempt to summarize fiction, the best you can do is water it down into some platitude that pales in comparison to the underlying novel. Why is that? Perhaps it is because, at its core, all fiction follows an archetypical story — the foundational pattern of all stories are the same. As Paulo Coelho remarked: “Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”
Yet, despite this central truth, there is undeniable value in reading fiction and immersing yourself in the narrative. The fiction reading experience is an exercise in empathy, where we communicate and achieve an emotional resonance with the author. The theologian John S. Dunne calls this process “passing over,” where entering the author’s carefully-constructed world of different characters and stories allows you to experience numerous lives and journeys. At its core, the “passing over” in fiction renders you a fundamentally different person.
From this description of reading fiction as “passing over,” we can derive another analogy: reading fiction engenders the same growth as traveling. When you come back from a voyage, it’s hard to articulate the benefit of your trip. Most likely, it will be limited to a non-descriptive summary of the places you visited — “We went to go see this amazing museum, then toured a spectacular ruin, ate at these phenomenal restaurants. It was awesome: you have to visit!” Yet, that short two-sentence summary of your trip pales severely lacks when compared to your evolution and growth, and there’s something in the experience that escapes your ability to express it in words.
In both reading fiction and traveling, the benefit is unique to the individual. The person’s growth and evolution come from understanding how their existing beliefs or lenses shift by interacting with a different physical world (traveling) or a different literary world (reading fiction). This journey is deeply personal and requires an enormous amount of unique context to explain the change experienced. Imagine someone attempting to adequately explain why a book changed them: “Since a young age, I had this view on this topic because of personal experience 1, 2, 3. Therefore, when I followed the journey of the main character and saw how she dealt with X, Y, Y scenarios, it caused me to question my core approaches through life…”
You can’t distill learning from fiction in the same way that you can for non-fiction. “Passing over” in reading fiction is an intensely personal experience, which fundamentally requires a lot of context and exposition that can’t be easily transmitted in bite-sized nuggets.