Why only novels

When someone first encounters a reading plan composed exclusively of novels, the question naturally arises. Only novels? To build critical thinking? Wouldn't a good essay, a treatise, something with footnotes be more serious?

The question deserves a serious answer, because the decision is not an aesthetic whim. It is, in all likelihood, the most well-supported decision of the entire itinerary. And to explain it, we must begin with a flight simulator.

The Simulator

In 2008, psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley published the theory that organized an entire field of research. Their starting point: psychology had ignored fiction for a century because it seemed to be mere entertainment. A mistake. Fiction, they propose, is something else: a simulation of the social world. Novels compress, abstract, and simplify the human experience just as a map compresses a territory, and in reading them we run that simulation in our own minds: we feel emotions congruent with the characters, we make inferences about their intentions, we predict and we err.

Their analogy has become famous: a pilot improves in the flight simulator without ever leaving the ground. He who immerses himself in the simulations of fiction trains in the domain that fiction is about, which is exactly one: people. In their studies, regular exposure to fiction was associated with a better understanding of others; interestingly, an exclusive diet of non-fiction was associated with the opposite. One can know a great deal and understand very few people.

Oatley has formulated it in a way that is difficult to improve upon: to read a novel is to incorporate a fragment of another's consciousness.

What the Science Says — Truly

In 2013, the journal Science published an experiment that went viral around the world: reading passages of literary fiction—not essays, not genre best-sellers—immediately improved performance on tests of "theory of mind," the ability to understand that others have beliefs and desires different from one's own.

Since then, that study is cited in every article about the benefits of reading. What happened next is almost never told, and here we are going to tell it, because it matters.

Replications yielded mixed results. Some teams reproduced the effect; others, including experiments in which the original author himself participated, did not find it or found it only partially. The honest conclusion of the field, a decade later, is this: the effect of a single dose is fragile. Reading a short story this afternoon does not make you a better person tonight.

What does endure, and with great solidity, is something else: the effect of habit. Habitual readers of literary fiction perform better in understanding other minds, and the relationship holds when accounting for age, educational level, and even self-reported empathy. It is not that empathetic people read more: it is that sustained familiarity with fiction predicts something that other variables do not explain.

There is a secondary finding from that same research that deserves to be highlighted, because it is the criterion of all canon expressed in the language of the laboratory: characters in popular fiction are perceived as more predictable and stereotypical than those in literary fiction. Consumer fiction confirms the models you already have of people. Literature complicates them for you. And only that which complicates you trains you.

Look at what follows from all of this. If the effect lies in the habit and not in the dose, then what someone who wants to form themselves needs is not a book recommendation for the summer. It is an itinerary spanning years. That is exactly what a reading plan is.

What Only Fiction Can Do

But the strongest argument in favor of the novel does not depend on any experiment, and is considerably older than psychology.

Aristotle formulated it twenty-three centuries ago: poetry is more philosophical than history, because history tells what happened and poetry what might happen — the universal. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has stated it for our time: there are truths about moral life that can only be told in narrative form; the form of the novel is not a wrapper for the content, it is part of the content. And Vargas Llosa gave it the perfect title: the truth of lies. Novels lie —that is their nature— and through that lie they say something true about the human condition that cannot be said in any other way.

Test this with an example. You can read the best essay ever written on jealousy: you will walk away informed about jealousy. Read Othello and you will have been inside jealousy, you will have felt how it reasons, how it justifies itself, how an intelligent man destroys himself with impeccable arguments. The essay gives you the map. The novel puts you in the territory. A critical judgment formed only with maps is a judgment that has never stepped on anything.

The Format That Cannot Be Summarized

And here comes the argument of our era, the one that makes this ancient decision suddenly and fiercely relevant.

An essay transmits information and arguments. Therefore, a machine can summarize it in ten lines without essential loss: its content is separable from its form. We already live in the world where any student can request that summary and obtain it in three seconds.

A novel cannot be summarized. Its plot can be summarized, of course: "a student kills an old pawnbroker and cannot bear what he has done." But that summary contains nothing of what Crime and Punishment does to whoever reads it, because the content of a novel is not the information it carries: it is the experience of going through it. Having been Raskolnikov for six hundred pages does not fit into a synopsis, just as having been in love does not fit into a synopsis.

In the era of the automatic summary, the novel is the only format of knowledge that demands presence. You cannot delegate to anyone —nor to anything— having lived inside someone else. Therefore, when everything summarizable has become cheap, a reading plan of novels is not the soft option. It is the only one that does not allow itself to be counterfeited.

Reading Slowly in the Era of Scrolling

There remains a practical objection: who reads six hundred pages today?

Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, who has spent a lifetime studying the reading brain, has documented the problem with precision: reading on screens is training us in skim reading —"the technology we have created is a magnet for skim reading"— and with it, what she calls deep reading is eroded: connecting what you already know with the new, making analogies, adopting another's perspective, integrating everything into your own judgment. Her list of deep reading operations is, almost word for word, the definition of critical thinking.

Wolf's response is not nostalgia but deliberate training: reserving a screen-free space every day for the reading that demands it. The long novel is the natural gymnasium of that capacity, precisely because it cannot be read diagonally. Fifteen minutes a day, every day, for years, do what no binge can do.

A Journey of Novels

For all these reasons, a serious humanities itinerary reads novels. Only novels, and of the kind that complicate.

Novels to understand science from wonder —there are few better science classes than chasing a white whale for six hundred pages—. Novels that speak our language on both shores: Cervantes and García Márquez, Galdós and Gallegos. Four levels of depth per stage, because the beginner and the one who has been reading for years do not need the same door. And a mentor with whom to discuss what has been read, because reading finishes its work when it is thought out loud with another.

It is not the fastest way to build critical thinking. It is the only one that works. Shortcuts are for what can be summarized.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.