By reading literature we learn to know ourselves in new ways. Literature can help us to have mercy on ourselves and others, can divest us of the ignorance that places ourselves at the center of the universe, can make possible new ways of understanding our own befuddled choices. Augustine recognized that we cannot know God without first knowing ourselves. In complex characters and broken situations and deeply human conundrums we have space to explore facets of our souls that we hide from ourselves as much as we do from others.

If there is no time to waste, why should we read fiction?