The Friday File: By requiring readers to understand characters’ motivations and intuit their feelings, reading literary fiction is highly correlated with, and possibly fosters, empathy towards others. Moreover, fiction readers also have richer social networks than those that read less fiction. The key, a moving and transformative narrative. Forget the “Art of the Deal”, I’m reading “Lost Time” by Proust, which at 3,031 pages is considered the world’s longest novel.