Farsighted: How we Make the Decisions That Matter Most by Steven Johnson points our attention to one more benefit of being a reader of literary fiction. His book suggests that reading literary fiction can improve decision making, Novelists draw out the complexity of their characters' inner lives and fictional situations help us to see decisions from the point of view of others. A novel does not  give you the answers, but it does make you better at following the threads.

John Steinbeck and a 2019 aspiration

From John Steinbeck—worth pondering

“There are events in our personal lives and our collective history that seem categorically irredeemable, moments in which the grounds for gratefulness and hope have sunk so far below the sea level of sorrow that we have ceased to believe they exist. But we have within us the consecrating capacity to rise above those moments and behold the bigger picture in all of its complexity, complementarity, and temporal sweep, and to find in what we see not illusory consolation but the truest comfort there is: that of perspective.”

A 2019 aspiration amongst many….