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How to Read a Novel
Why fiction gives us an antidote to narrowband thinking.
I sketched out an answer to this question in my book Farsighted, arguing that novels (and fictional narratives in general) were extensions of the human mind’s marvelous aptitude for building simulations of potential events. They show how those private moments of emotional intensity are inevitably linked to a broader political context; how technological changes rippling through society can impact a marriage; how the chattering of small‑town gossip can weigh on one’s personal finances. As in most of his later novels, Dickens builds a narrative that manages to connect a staggeringly wide cross-section of the social classes of industrial London, and the superorganism of the city itself is genuinely a character in the book.
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