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Showing posts from September, 2018

Check Your Reading

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Readers are smart people. We know that. Reading almost anything makes you learn things, even if they're not massively important things. Non-fiction is the most reliable source for learning, although you have to be careful whose nonfiction it is. Recent studies showed that reading fiction make a person more empathetic, presumably because you frequently put yourself in the place--even inside the head--of others and see life from viewpoints other than your own. (I enjoy writing the Sleuth Sisters Mysteries for that very reason: I have to think like each sister in order to tell the story the way she would see it.) We develop habits over time with our reading, and that's both good and bad. If you always read one genre and even one sub-genre, sooner or later you're going to end up in a rut. I've gone through quite a few phases in my lifetime. For a while I read lots of biographies and autobiographies. Then I read almost exclusively historical fiction. Now I read mostly my