Reading your way to main character energy
March 6, 2025
In parenting land, there are numerous dividing lines. Screen hours, sweet consumption, bed times among a few. But who would have thought something as innocuous as World Book Day would be among them? Look away if you have a child who enjoys dressing up, you won’t understand the pain. When my boys were little fancy dress was not their thing. If free sweets and an October evening dashing around dark streets knocking on strangers’ doors wasn’t involved, neither were costumes. Their lack of enthusiasm for World Book Day celebrations had no bearing on how much they enjoyed books. Just how much they hated dressing up.
Nowadays I can happily enjoy the stream of children skipping to school in their little book-themed outfits. The gift of time and perspective heals many a painful parenting moment. The boys are men, they read books, they sometimes dress up.
I write for a living and so I am an absolute fangirl of reading. I simply don’t think you can be good at writing, if you’re not interested in reading. Reading builds our vocabularies. Of course, you don’t have to write to read. But anything that encourages people, of any age, to open a book or fire up their e-reader is to be lauded in my mind.
I’m not alone at Pumpkin in thinking this. Maureen Corish, our managing director, is also a trustee at The Reading Agency, which widely promotes the benefit of reading. Its library-based Summer Reading Challenge is one of many initiatives to encourage people to turn to books, this one aimed at primary school children (and back to personal parenting experience, it’s a phenomenal scheme as long as we still have libraries).
A novel approach
Reading novels is pretty much good for everything – your mental health, brain health (more blood flows to your brain as you read novels), social skills and longevity. There’s an excellent Micheal Mosley Just One Thing podcast that lays out the science behind all these claims. For many managing their anxiety, opening a book could be a simple step. A mental health study called The Rest Test found reading was people’s top way to find peace and rest in their daily lives. Combine it with a book club and the solitary pursuit of reading becomes a communal and social experience. My book club has been meeting for 11 years and it remains the highlight of any month.
But an area of science around the benefits of reading novels that I think is most interesting is that it helps us be more empathetic. It may seem counterintuitive that a world of fiction can have such an impact on the real world, but nonetheless the evidence is there. By accessing characters’ lives, we are better able to understand people in the real world. It forces us to think beyond ourselves, to consider other lives and ways of being. It helps us with our social interactions and be better at inferring what other people think. It feels like we’re living through a time when we all need more of this!
Reading lessons for leaders
World Book Day may be focused on reading for pleasure but this form of leisure also benefits our business (and otherwise) leaders. All those tricky dilemmas, those moral choices, those tough decisions, those moments when you must understand why someone has behaved in a certain way. As moral leadership expert, Brooke Vuckovic, wrote in the Harvard Business Review: “Classic and contemporary works of fiction can meaningfully enhance leaders’ ability to manage moral complexity at work, through low-cost lessons and practice.”
If you’re still not convinced, I’ll leave the last word to author Margaret Heffernan: “I mentor a handful of senior and chief executives, and the ones that read a lot have so many more choices in their heads than those who don’t. So, I say read, read, read, read, and read some more.”
By Jane Bainbridge