Novels are empathy practice. You spend three hundred pages inside a stranger’s head.

Fiction is the one place you get sustained access to another person’s reasoning from the inside, including the parts they would never say aloud. Real people hand you the outside and the summary. A few hundred pages of somebody thinking in a way you do not gradually makes other people feel less like obstacles. It works as practice without ever being a lesson.

Read one novel this year about a person you would have nothing in common with. Do not hunt for the moral. Stay with them long enough that their reasoning stops seeming strange, and notice where that turns up later.