Newcastle University

So in terms of the benefits of reading, what would you say that reading gives you?

[Pause] A wider outlook on life. [laughter] Because you read about different scenarios and different situations and different perspectives. Pleasure. Enjoyment. The childhood thing of taking you into other worlds. Things to reflect on and think about. I mean, I used to … I used to teach on a social work programme. And there were a couple of articles that I’d read or heard about that actually talked about how fiction helps people imagine situations and then think about how they would handle them in their own lives. And I think somebody had done some research demonstrating that people who read fiction could be more empathic than people who didn’t. [laughter] Which I thought was really interesting. Obviously it sort of pleased me, really [laughter] in a way, because it linked to my own sort of observations. But we would … You know, some books that were relevant to particular topics we looked at, like mental health or domestic violence or something, we would recommend, you know, literature that we knew, as well as sort of textbooks and journal articles as well. So … You know, I think that sometimes it just gives people a much better picture. Something like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night [sic], I think it’s a really excellent portrayal of somebody with Asperger’s, and probably more so than just reading a possibly quite dry article about what Asperger’s is, you know, is a way of helping people think about what people’s responses might be and how we view people with Asperger’s and so on.