one of my college English professors would say 'reading makes your soul grow big,' something he said he heard from a friends dad. it's stuck with me.

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me"

This is wonderful, I often regret having completely forgotten the content of some books, but this makes me feel less bad about it.

If you came up with this thank you dear internet person!

This came up recently on HN, in terms of "kinds of memory" - there are different forms of memory, and we have pretty good evidence that some of them persist regardless of conscious recall. Rest assured that even if you have poor recall of them they continue to shape who you are and how you behave.

If you want to learn about the provenance: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/06/20/books/

Appreciated!

Lovely quote! Emerson.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote something similar about doing art of any kind.

Reading as a method to learn empathy - 100%.

To me, diving into different stories and perspectives basically broadens the way I perceive life in general.

Some recent mind-bending gems to me were all books by Hanya Yanagihara and the supreme universe Liu Cixin has built.

Books all some from a much wider range of authors than things like TV. Many authors write about what they know and there are authors from all historical times, and all cultures (current or historical) - as well as imagined ones, of course. I think a strength of books is that they are more likely to require you to adjust to the point of view of the author or the characters, rather adjusting the characters to be easy for you to identify with. That builds more empathy.

I get zero empathy from fiction. Never think "Oh, this guy I met must feel like Atticus Finch" or "So sad, it's like The Grapes of Wrath." I get empathy from reading real people on Reddit saying "you know what's tough about being a waiter/chemist/influencer?" because they explain how real people think.

I assume anything I read on reddit at this point is AI written click bait, so giant grains of salt on any personal anecdote probably gives me the opposite reaction.

I used to think like that, but after reading Anna Karenina I realized that I only get empathy from remarkably few works of fiction.

Good writing is very very very hard.

Empathy may not be the right term for this, but I've noticed recently times of emotional resonance with some characters/stories. One recent example that I particularly noticed this with was actually a Harry Potter fan fiction. It was fairly well written, but you know, not exactly fine literature. But I noticed how activated my emotions were getting reading those stories, the anger coming up about how the character was being treated, the sense of righteousness in her response to the circumstances and people around her.

I'm not sure if that helped me understand other people better, but I think it may have helped me understand myself a little better. Get a little more in touch with my emotions about parts of my own life. A little catharsis.

And this is not the point, but I think that getting in touch with my own feelings more probably does lead to more empathy for me. I've definitely noticed that when I feel more compassion for myself, I often also notice an increased sense of compassion for others who I perceive similarly.

A mother cat teaches her kittens to hunt by demonstrating it on a dead mouse. Fiction works the same way: by showing it on a dummy. In real life things are small and overlapped. Fiction makes them big and separate. Once you've seen it big and separate, you can recognize it small and overlapped.

Books offer a unique window into the lives and minds of others

Oh yes. Books like Primo Levi “If This Is a Man” are good to read. Also some can you into deep depression… it’s important to be careful to let the door to your mind opened to anything.