I take broad view that reading is good for you. It improves vocabulary. Boosts language skills and school marks. Improves general knowledge.

Keeps you out of trouble (all that time we spend reading, when we could be out binge-drinking and street-fighting and committing ATM fraud). But does reading novels make you a better person? Can novel-reading create a better society?

Recently I happened on a study that found that fiction readers do better on scores of social skills than non-readers, and show more empathy. (Readers of non-fiction did not show the same pattern, incidentally).

It makes sense. When you read a novel, you put yourself in someone else's shoes, you imagine their reality. You develop empathy. Novels often introduce us to the underdog, the unseen in society. Children, servants, the old, the abused, minorities of all sorts, and other outsider groups are brought to the fore and their lives and feelings intimately examined. In novels, they are often seen as protagonists in their own lives, rather than bit-players in someone else's.

My reading in just the last few weeks has illustrated this observation, and exposed me to diverse experiences, stories, characters and eras. In The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller takes us to ancient Greece in the age of heroes, through the eyes of Achilles' beloved companion, the exiled prince Patroclus. In this poetically written page-turner, Achilles is portrayed not just as the famously arrogant and blood-thirsty warrior, but as a lover, friend and a son, a flawed man/god. In Andrea Levy's The Long Song we are on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the dying days of slavery. It's harrowing, as one expects from the setting, but also gently, surprisingly, amusing. July, the old ex-slave who is writing her memoir, has a wry eye, and presents herself and her fellow slaves in their full human complexity, their bravery, social snobbery and resourcefulness.

Next stop, London, where the Congolese immigrants exist on the margins of British society in the novel Rhumba, by South African born filmmaker turned novelist Elaine Proctor. At the heart of this story is 10-year-old Flambeau, awaiting the arrival of his mother, Bijou, from the Congo. Knight, a sharp-dressing, Rhumba-dancing Congolese gangster, and his Scottish girlfriend Eleanor, are drawn into Flambeau's search, and he into their dangerous, passionate life. My heart ached for the homesick, lonely child, searching for his mother, and for the harshness of the immigrant experience, so tenderly portrayed in this novel.

Jane Smiley, in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, claims for novels an important role as an engine for change. She writes: "When I have read a long novel, when I have entered systematically into a sensibility that is alien to mine, when I have become interested in another person because he is interesting, not because he is privileged or great, there is a possibility that at the end that I will be a degree less self-centered ..."

When we read, we also encounter our own reactions and prejudices, and our hopes and fears, and perhaps find ourselves a little changed for the better.

Can't say the same for reality TV. I accidentally caught a glimpse of the Kardashians the other day, and even that small exposure rendered me more judgmental, less generous-spirited and in some despair over the human condition. I'm ever so slightly nastier now than I was before. Back to novels for me.