One of the worst things we can do to ourselves is become too serious. There is this Calvinist hangover in Europe and North America that if it is fun it can't be good for you. But all the Science shows that learning through play, through music, through group interaction and through movement is far more effective than miserable rote learning sat at a desk. Which goes quadruple if you are neurodivergent in some way. Reading is a way to learn through play. Not just filling our head with facts (although that can happen too) it is about building a brain architecture, linking neural pathways, and exercising those neurons.

I think reading expands our ability to empathise with people, because we literally step into a characters shoes and see things from their perspective. Which makes it easier to do with real people. It can also show us perspectives of people from different races, physical abilities, gender, cultures.

But I think we need a balance of a lot of different experiences to really build a whole brain. Gaming, art, sports*, music, socialising with friends, all of it builds brains.

*Sports is another area which people get annoyingly serious about. Casual fun games for the non athlete start to disappear as kids get older.

Ah, without a doubt! Reading in general can indeed improve your imagination, it's generally a very healthy way to have fun, and depending on what you read, you might need to think! Thanks for your response in advance! Good points

Fantasy and Sci-fi can be very good for teaching critical thinking skills. The set up still exists to say something about our condition but it’s often occluded by the genre tropes forcing the reader to dig for meanings and interpretations.

You’ll see this done with Literary books all the time. People search through descriptions and bits looking for deeper meaning. But the same people often say it doesn’t exist in speculative fiction because they’re so used to looking at the small scale that they don’t know how to look at the large scale as well.

For instance my favorite book is a speculative fiction book about a species with sex differentiated brains and racial memory. Males can remember everything that their male ancestors knew up to the moment of their conception. Females can remember everything their female ancestors knew in the same way. So their culture is ancient and static. There are essentially no crossover skills between the sexes and they treat each other as fundamentally different because they are fundamentally different by accumulation. And then one human child is introduced who has no ancestral memories and doesn’t have a sex limitation on skills. The human child has to adapt to their alien ways in order to survive with them. These are the surface facts of the book.

Scratch under the surface and deny the metaphor that they are a different species from us and suddenly every choice in the story becomes a commentary about our own beliefs about gender, gender differences, and their naturalness. You can interrogate the author’s choices about what it means to a man or a woman and how they should relate to each other. You don’t have to agree. The author leans toward the idea that human nature isn’t confined that way since the identified human child is not confined in the way her people are. But the author still gives the little girl many strong desires that we would consider feminine, suggesting that those ARE natural. As she grows up she has problems adapting to the ways of her people which without the metaphor becomes an argument that most of how we treat gender is unnatural and has to be forced onto people which lets the reader in turn analyze how social forces are used to enforce gender compliance. It ends up getting as deep as dealing with the idea of individual choice itself vs. cultural demands and influences.

Back when I taught that book along with other speculative fiction texts in college, the first tip I gave my students was to “deny the metaphor.” The book will have magic or aliens or whatever but if you treat what does not exist as if it is a metaphor for something that does exist in our own world right now, what would it be a metaphor for? Now think about what the book is saying about that. And the book suddenly lends itself to all the tools of analysis and critical thought that you can use on every other text. Even relatively simple books become deeper narratives.

A well known example (and my last one) is X-Men, who are knowingly used as a metaphor for marginalized groups. It’s just action superhero rock-em-sock-em but deny the metaphor and there are just as deep meanings to be mined. As just one example you have Scott Summers as Cyclops who has magical laser blast eyes which require special equipment to maintain so he never directly looks at something and destroys it. Deny the metaphor and his marginalized gaze is dangerous and destructive, for everyone’s safety he must never directly look at anything without careful controls. The metaphor is easily interpreted as a combination of uncontrollable rage and submission. And Scott is the teacher’s pet, he’s the most rules oriented person, so he must always follow the rules because he can’t contain himself if he looks past them. So the reader can question this in racially charged relations. How does he comment on the disrespectfulness of giving someone the eye? How does he comment on people who are tight laced and supportive of the system when they themselves are oppressed by it? And again, you don’t have to agree. You can assemble an author’s argument and then rebut it, teaching you to interrogate the messages that texts are trying to send you and have a different opinion instead.

Not just language, even in fantasy you can experience someone else's life. There was a study recently that reader's have higher rates of empathy. You get to practice understanding other people through reading.

Reading (primarily fantasy/scifi) improved my vocabulary. It also can teach about other people's experiences and perspectives in an enjoyable way. Therefore can teach empathy and compassion. Yes, even fiction reading is beneficial.

I don’t think anyone can answer the question of why fantasy matters better than Sir Terry Pratchett.

Other benefits related to reading (including fantasy and sci-fi, for example):

• Exercises the brain since you need to remember characters, settings and other important details.
• Strengthens brain connections due to processing, analysing, etc. what you are reading. Even if you don't do deep-analysis, your brain is still constantly working to make sense of what you read.
• Scientists believe that reading can protect cognitive function as we age and can even lower risk of dementia.
• Improves focus and concentration.
• Improves empathy because you are constantly putting yourself in someone else's shoes.
• It reduces stress which in return affects heart, etc.

"It will test your head, and your mind, and your brain too." - Dewey Finn

I definitely went into that book expecting >!aliens!<

All fiction, including genre fiction like sci fi/fantasy, can be used to explore themes. That's where the value is, I think - they force you to engage with potentially new ways of thinking and seeing things.

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Also, good fiction tells the truth. As one commenter noted, often through allegory. It's often a way for people who can't talk about their situation to explore and discuss something adjacent in a healthy way. Fiction can teach about people and their motivations, and the things that unite and divide them. It can teach about politics in a non-partisan way. It can bring human rights issues into the forefront of our minds. It can depend on the skill of the writer, but also the engagement of the reader. At the end of the day, if you're happy with a story purely for entertainment, that's enough. But you can always ask yourself, what can I take from this story and apply to my life? How can the lessons the characters learn benefit me? Who can I relate to, why do I relate to them, and how do I feel about that?

Fiction is IMPORTANT. It gives us a chance to really think about what it means to be human.

I could literally write a book about all of the reasons that sci-fi and fantasy are just as important as literary fiction.

But I don't have the time right now.

I think you can accomplish the same thing without writing it the way Vuong did. His style felt like he was trying so hard to be profound and instead it came off like Tumblr quotes.

Just my personal opinion, it just wasn't for me.

I don't think reading books is inherently "beneficial." You get out of books what you put into them. If you are reading with the purpose of improving your grammar or vocabulary, then any sort of novel can aid with this. If you are looking to expand your stylistic influences for your own writing, any works can help here if you are deliberately paying attention to the style of what is written. If you want to improve your critical and analytical skills, you can do so by evaluating what you have read against whatever critical framework you want to use, others' or your own.

I think there is a commonly held belief that just by reading you will become "smarter." I don't think this is true. I think you really have to work and read with intention to get any such benefits. School often directs this type of work by forcing you to do this to succeed in language and literature classes. E.g. you have to write book reports, take book tests, do vocab tests, take grammar tests. Reading books is part of these classes to help develop your skills and practice what you've learned.

But if you're an adult reader, I don't think you will get these benefits unless you are intentionally seeking them.

Also, I don't really understand why you would call out "web novels and cliche stuff" as being insufficient texts for any of this kind of learning. I think you can do the same sorts of extrapolation, evaluation and analysis with any text, no matter its intentions, format, or origins. Many people think sci-fi, fantasy, and genre fiction generally are not substantial enough to hold up to this type of reading either, and I think that's also misguided.

TLDR: You can "benefit" from reading any books, but I don't think it's something that just happens passively from the simple act of reading.

I’d ask what the alternative is? Only thing to learn from non fiction is that everyone is a liar.

Reading exercises your mind and your brain.

It is very easy not to know the plot of every one of Christie's books. While some are well-known and have big adaptions (i.e. Murder On The Orient Express) there are plenty that are less read. She wrote 74 novels, plus short stories and plays. Most people will not know all of them. I have 30 in my house, but that still leaves plenty to go.

I am always with my Kindle and almost exclusively read Fantasy and Science Fiction. I feel that reading fiction is a form of entertainment, nothing more, which I feel (strictly in my opinion) is a better form of entertainment than mindless scrolling through social media, YouTube and Tiktok.

>they don't necessarily teach you anything

It may not be immediately apparent but reading fiction helps us understand different characters and their thoughts. It helps build empathy and makes us look and feel through the eyes of people very different to us. It helps develop our imagination and creativity. It improves our emotional intelligence. Ofcourse, all this depends on the fictional books we read, some are masterpiece others utter trash. It boils down to how we choose to use the experience and information.

Have you read Ray Bradbury? Isaac Asimov? Mary Shelley? Tolkien? Gaiman? Sanderson? C.S. Lewis? I can keep going.

There are tons of scifi and fantasy authors who do, in fact, make you think.

Just as the other user said, it has some basic benefits such as getting more contact with a rich vocabulary and the language in general.

But there's also a subjective benefit imo. For me at least reading is both fun, healthy and an active habit. When I spend some time reading I am able to push away depression and usually get more active overall, more well-disposed. It gives me a feeling that I have done something both enjoyable and productive.

I also, for whatever reason, get more thoughtful and able to articulate better during the periods I read. Even my dreams seem to become much more vivid in that period.

I think that being such an imaginative habit it might be good for the mind.

i like to read the preface AFTER i finish the book because they are meant for people (usually academic scholars) returning to the book after having already read it.

Human inspiration, imagination, future visionaries (what to strive for and what not to) all in fictional stories! Imo the past is for non-fiction or fictional escapism.

But truly, beyond that even, fiction can show human, psyche, human nature, and sociology so much better that nonfiction can Imo.

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Ah so it's mostly the language aspect. Actually didn't think of that.

So other than the language-learning part, it's, at least for the most part, just for entertainment I guess. Which is also great considering you're getting entertained while improving your grammar/vocabulary

Thanks a bunch for putting time in on reading my post and responding!

And you exercise your imagination!