Reading with your feet on the ground

Mandy Brown on reading and the limits of empathy: To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself. But this means that you are there when you are reading; you, the reader, with your feet on the ground, a ground on which racism, misogyny, and extreme poverty are not so easily dispatched. You must read where you are, not in some hypothetical sanitized reading room, but in the dirt. To use reading to step into someone else’s shoes is to leave yourself behind.