Why You Should Read More Fiction

Why human storytelling matters: the science behind attention, memory, and connection.

How do the stories we read shape the ways we think, perceive, and navigate the world? In this ambitious and timely book, Andrew Piper argues that fiction is far more than entertainment. Stories cultivate attention, perspective, and embodied understanding in ways increasingly vital to modern life.

Piper is the director of McGill University's ".txtlab," a digital humanities laboratory that uses AI and computational modeling to study how storytelling works. Rather than using AI to generate fiction, Piper employs these tools to analyze patterns across thousands of novels, folk tales, fan-fiction archives, and works of contemporary global literature. By translating elements of narrative—characters, emotions, objects, behaviors, social relationships, and points of view—into measurable features, his lab can identify patterns that no individual reader could easily detect through ordinary reading alone. Across these diverse traditions of storytelling, Piper demonstrates that fiction consistently foregrounds lived experience: characters moving through richly textured environments, objects charged with emotional and cognitive significance, worlds rendered through accumulated sensory detail. These patterns reveal fiction's distinctive ability to model how minds and bodies engage with their surroundings. Piper connects these findings to the cognitive science concept of embodied cognition, or the idea that thought emerges through our physical and emotional engagement with the world.

Fiction, he argues, does more than immerse us in imagined worlds. It trains us to examine experience with greater flexibility, attention, and interpretive distance. By coordinating our attention around the lives of others across cultures and centuries, stories help us inhabit perspectives that would otherwise remain inaccessible. At a moment when AI is reshaping how we think about language and creativity, Why You Should Read More Fiction offers a powerful defense of human storytelling and reading.