Surprisingly, Johnson suggests novels, pointing to George Eliot’s Middlemarch as his primary example. But, says Johnson, great novelists can push us further, past the mere interiority of their characters’ mental and emotional experience. It’s happened to me many, many times; in reading about others’ shortcomings, I’ve indirectly glimpsed my own. Cody Delistraty describes how reading helped him navigate the death of his mother:In reading . For what it’s worth, Patrick Collison wasn’t the only one who read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate last year.