That matters more than it might seem. Most people's actual experience of the world is narrow—bound by where they were born, who raised them, and what job they ended up in. Reading is one of the few reliable ways to break out of that. A novel set in a different country can teach you more about how people actually live there than a guidebook ever could because it shows you daily life instead of listing tourist attractions. A memoir about someone's illness can teach a healthy reader things about resilience and fear that no lecture on the subject would convey in the same way.

It's not only fiction doing this work, either. Essays, biographies, and even well-written non-fiction carry the same power. A biography of a scientist doesn't just list their discoveries—it shows the years of failure before the breakthrough, the doubt, and the stubbornness it took to keep going. That kind of........

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