💬 Read Fiction

David, your discussion of fiction reminded me of an interview between Stan Grant and Dan Haesler where at the end of the conversation they talk about the power of reading, thinking and questioning when it comes to leadership. This is about going beyond one’s own world view and challenging your perceptions. I think that fiction is a powerful way of doing this.

As Ursula K. Le Guin touches on in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness:

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

Two pieces of fiction that have left me wondering lately have been Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Both capture a world from many different perspectives vastly different from my own.