Reading across a genres, subjects, and perspectives has the power to pop the filter bubbles that many of us increasingly find ourselves in, both online and off. It’s how we develop a healthy intellectual humility, where no single ideology or belief system monopolises truth.

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities

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