Are we what we read?

Recently, I have encountered three commentaries that  expressed views on how our reading, particularly fiction, becomes part of us and changes us. Michael Dirda, writing in his blog in The Washington Post, says he doesn't feel he's actually read a book until he writes about it. "Composing a review or an essay seems the final stage of reading, a way or summarizing my experience of the novel, biography or work of history." His reading leads to creative writing. He muses that others may join book clubs for this reason.

Second, an article that reached me via Zite.com, an aggregating site that creates a cyber magazine based on the user's expressed and revealed tastes, described a study by Keith Oakley and Raymond Mar at the University of Toronto. The study demonstrated personality changes from reading a Chekhov story. Mar describes their central assumption, "When people are reading literary fiction, they're creating in their mind a simulation of experience...." They applied a personality tests to students before and after they read either a Chekhov story or a summary of basic plot points. Reading the story had a small effect on personality (after all, it was only one story), and the plot points did not. However, the changes varied among individuals. The question is how much effect does habitual reading of literature have on our personalities?

Finally, at Chautaugua Institution in July, I attended a lecture in the literary program in which a novelist asserted that fiction builds the capacity for empathy by immersing the reader in others' experiences. Fiction is valuable because it does this he feels. I agree and would add that history is also valuable for this reason.

Dirda worries that reading groups could also become pressure groups, not a worry I share. But recently I decided not to read Daniel Silva's thrillers anymore because the most recent one contained excessive gratuitous violence in my opinion. Could habitual reading of violent fiction have a negative personality effect?

Should we begin to think of changes in ourselves as part of the experience of reading?