So, I get a daily newsletter called NumLock News that contains interesting articles based on statistics. Here’s a book-related one that was included today:
A new paper published in Current Opinion in Psychology assessed evidence that reading fiction books has strong and repeatable benefits, finding that reading fiction in particular was a stronger predictor of verbal skills than reading nonfiction. One long-running study the paper looked at found that teenagers who spent more of their free time reading became adults who were more socially connected, seeing family and friends more often. A study of 3,500 older adults found that those who read books survived 23 months longer than nonreaders, an association that held strongly for books compared to newspapers or magazines, and from a cohort of readers where 87 percent read fiction.
