For many years, doing all that work-required reading of text books and manuals just to catch up with my jobs --- from how to calculate insurance premiums to retail banking to chartered accounting to contract auditing on the biggest construction job in the world to industrial catering to setting up a new airline's audit department to accounting for offshore oil exploration to setting up a new shipping line to management consulting for a seaport to commodity trading in Saudi Arabia and the management of a fleet of bulk carriers in Greece (not to mention scores of smaller jobs in between), to finally setting up my own practice in writing bespoke accounting software --- never left me time to read any fiction.
It was not until my retirement that I discovered fiction and realised it wasn't just another form of self-indulgence. I discovered that reading fiction was doing something beneficial to my brain that non-fiction did not: fiction required me to put myself into the shoes of another person and helped me flex my empathy muscle. It asked me to keep an open mind for the length of an entire book, which can be a really long time.
There's so much to be gained from reading non-fiction books. Reading is one of the most important things we can do to build our brains. And yet, so many say that we don't have time to do it. I would say, we don't have time to not do it. I wished I had started reading fiction much sooner.
