We know reading makes you smarter. But reading literary fiction makes you smarter in specific ways.

I read because I grew up poor and books were a way to travel, meet new people and learn interesting things without leaving the front porch. As I’ve said many times, I’m suspicious of people who “only” read non-fiction, and proclaim it as if to prove how worthy they are. The research continues to show that reading literary fiction broadens and deepens your emotional skills:

Beach reading season is over, so it’s time to plunge into some serious fiction. But if the idea of plowing through a Pynchon feels a bit too much like work, here’s a piece of news that may inspire you: Doing so may help you better discern the beliefs, motivations, and emotions of those around you.

That’s the conclusion of a just-published study by two scholars from the New School for Social Research in New York. David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano report that reading literature uniquely boosts “the capacity to identify and understand others’ subjective states.”

Literary fiction, they note in the journal Science, “uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to characters’ subjective experiences.” Unlike most popular fiction, which “tends to portray the world and its characters as internally consistent and predictable,” these works require readers to contend with complex, sometimes contradictory characters.

According to Kidd and Castano, this sort of active engagement increases our ability to understand and appreciate the similarly complicated people we come across in real life.

[…] This study follows by a few weeks some similar research from Canada, which compared the ability of fans of different genres to discern emotional states by looking only at pair of eyes (one of the same tests performed here). In that study, readers of romance novels performed better than those of other genres, such as suspense thrillers. However, that research used a different methodology, and it did not specifically measure the impact of literary fiction.

“I don’t find these findings contradictory to our own study,” said Katrina Fong, lead author of the Canadian paper, “but see them as evidence contributing to the growing body of literature that indicates that the impacts of reading are complex. It’s entirely plausible that short-term effects of reading, such as boosts to interpersonal sensitivity, only exist for literary fiction.”