What is reading good for? Dominic Sandbrook, co-host of The Rest is History, has launched a new podcast, The Book Club, with the show’s producer, Tabitha Syrett. In an interview with the New Statesman, Sandbrook explains his reasons for dedicating a series to fiction and makes his case for the novel. A novel, he says, cultivates ‘that precious thing of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes’. Literature, he adds, does this ‘more powerfully than almost any other art form’. Without reading, he warns, ‘you become cocooned in your experience, in a way that becomes quite narcissistic’.

In the same interview, Sandbrook criticises the ‘worthy’ insistence that reading novels must have an ‘improving rationale’. Typical supporters of his beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers are unlikely to have read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, but that does not, he wryly notes, mean there is anything wrong with them. There is a tension here. What is it, after all, to claim that novels cultivate ‘empathy’ if not to claim they improve us? For, if someone lacks ‘empathy’, are they not – by this logic – morally defective?

The beauty of reading lies in its essential solitude. If you want to be less ‘cocooned in your experience’, go to the pub. Talk to the postman. Stop and speak to your neighbour on the way home. Reading novels cocoons you in your own mind more completely than almost any other artform. A book’s production involves a vast array of skills – editors, paper plants, delivery drivers – yet in the act of reading they vanish. In a careful illusion, it is just you and the writer. Opera, the most palpably physical of artforms, visibly requires vast numbers of people – stagehands, ticket collectors, the cast, set designers – and an audience. If you seek art to remind yourself of our dependence on others, watch a large orchestra in action.

Reading stimulates the imagination, but engages memory more directly and profoundly. Novels offer moments of strange, tangential insight into the past – a perfect day, never to be repeated, suddenly seen anew, a pattern in a past relationship that explains its end, the peculiar troubles of childhood, only fully understood in adulthood. In the adult reader, imagination yields to memory. We have less to look forward to, but more to look back on.

Reading does not, in any straightforward sense, make you walk in someone else’s shoes. The standard contrast pits the non-reader, confined to immediate sensory experience, against the reader, supposedly simulating other minds. A more illuminating contrast was drawn by Robert Louis Stevenson, who attributed the power of ‘stories without ethical narrowness’ to ‘that sort of sense we seem to perceive in the arabesque of time and space’. Certain flourishes of style lead, mysteriously, to a more capacious view of the everyday.

Reading creates forms of experience that resemble empathy – a word with a rich history in aesthetics and philosophy. It is comparatively new to English, a transliteration coined at the turn of the 20th century from the German Einfühlung. In aesthetics, the term described the act of ‘feeling one’s way into’ an artwork in pursuit of poetic, even ecstatic truths. In this tradition, the artist fuses life and work, gradually shedding useless experiences. In time, they become capable of producing pure artworks. A human in contact with such art might, for a moment, feel capable of transcending the limits of the human – caught up in an ecstatic dance of the soul. The filmmaker Werner Herzog explicitly places himself in this tradition. In his films, the barriers between man, animal, prehistory and civilisation dissolve on screen.

Colloquial appeals to empathy load reading with a significance it cannot bear. Empathy as an aesthetic standard is far better suited to the visual and dramatic arts, or certain styles of poetry – in which the senses are rearranged by contact with precise arrangements of colour, word and rhythm. Reading novels rewards those who value close observation and sustained attention. Reading a lot simply builds the capacity for reading. It may or may not enrich understanding. Over time, the habit of reading may become richer and more potent: a faculty comfortable in many registers, fine and exacting in judgement. As Clive James observed: ‘People don’t get their morality from their reading matter: they bring their morality to it.’ Reading draws out what is already present: good qualities feel worthier; a hardened heart thickens further; gentleness grows more sensitive. Reading is useful, but it can never make us good by itself.