I have a confession. Until about three years ago, I read almost exclusively literary fiction. If a book wasn’t written in the style I’d been trained to admire in my MFA program (lyrical prose, unreliable narrators, ambiguous endings), I mostly ignored it. Nonfiction was for the bus. Genre fiction was for other people. I was, to be blunt about it, a snob.

I’m not proud of this. I’m also not sure it was entirely my fault. The literary world I came up in had strong and mostly unspoken hierarchies about what counted as serious reading. These hierarchies shaped my reading habits in ways I didn’t examine until I had to.

What changed was a combination of things: working at a publishing house that publishes both fiction and nonfiction, a long illness that left me too tired for the kind of close reading literary fiction demands, and a friend who kept recommending books I would never have picked up on my own. The result was a gradual, sometimes reluctant expansion of my reading life that has made me a better editor, a better reader, and, I think, a more interesting person to talk to at parties.

This is my case for reading outside your comfort zone. Not as a moral imperative or a self-improvement project, but as a practical strategy for getting more out of books.

The comfort zone problem

Everyone has a reading comfort zone. It’s the set of genres, styles, and subjects you default to when you’re browsing a bookstore or scrolling through an online catalog. There’s nothing wrong with having one. Comfort zones exist because the human brain likes predictability. When you pick up a familiar kind of book, you know roughly what you’re getting, and that predictability is pleasurable.

The problem is that comfort zones shrink over time if you don’t actively work against the contraction. You start by reading broadly, maybe as a teenager or young adult when everything is new. Then you find what you like. Then you read more of what you like. Then algorithms start reinforcing your preferences. Then your friends, who tend to read similar things, reinforce them further. Before long, your reading life is a narrowing channel, and the books outside it become invisible to you.

This narrowing has consequences that go beyond missing individual books. It affects how you think. Reading within a single genre or style trains you to see the world through a single lens. Literary fiction trains you to notice interior states and linguistic texture. Mystery fiction trains you to notice patterns and inconsistencies. Science writing trains you to think in terms of evidence and mechanism. History trains you to think in terms of contingency and context. Each lens reveals things the others don’t. If you only have one lens, you’re only seeing part of what’s there.

The genre boundary is fake

One of the things I’ve come to believe strongly is that the boundaries between literary fiction and genre fiction, and between fiction and nonfiction, are much less meaningful than the publishing industry pretends.

These boundaries exist for commercial reasons. Bookstores need to organize their shelves. Publishers need to know which buyers to pitch to. Marketing needs to identify a target audience. Categories make the business of selling books more efficient. But they don’t describe anything fundamental about the books themselves.

Consider: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is shelved in literary fiction. It’s also a Western. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is literary fiction. It’s also science fiction. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is literary fiction. It’s also an alternate history. The categorization tells you more about the marketing strategy than about the book.

At ScrollWorks, our catalog spans categories deliberately. The Last Archive by Catherine Voss is literary fiction with elements of mystery. Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield is historical fiction that reads like literary fiction. The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo is nonfiction that reads with the narrative drive of a novel. Still Waters by Elena Marsh is memoir that has the structural elegance of a well-crafted novel.

These books resist easy categorization, and that’s part of what makes them interesting. They borrow tools and techniques across genre lines. They assume their readers are capable of following them wherever they go, rather than staying within the safe boundaries of a single category.

What happened when I started reading nonfiction

The first nonfiction book I read seriously, as opposed to skimming on the bus, was The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. A friend had been recommending it for two years. I kept putting it off because it was a history of cancer, and why would I want to read 600 pages about cancer?

I picked it up during a week when I was sick and too fuzzy-headed for fiction. Within fifty pages, I was hooked. Not because the subject matter was pleasant, but because Mukherjee is a storyteller. He structures the history of cancer research as a narrative with characters, conflicts, reversals, and moments of genuine drama. The book uses every tool I associate with good fiction (vivid scenes, psychological complexity, narrative arc) in the service of a nonfiction subject.

This was a revelation. I’d been operating under the assumption that nonfiction was for information and fiction was for experience. That assumption was wrong. The best nonfiction provides both, and it does so using many of the same techniques that fiction uses.

After Mukherjee, I read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. Then Rebecca Solnit’s essays. Then Ed Yong’s science writing. Each book expanded my sense of what prose could do. And, less expectedly, each book made me a better reader of fiction, because I was developing new ways of paying attention that transferred across genres.

What fiction readers can learn from nonfiction

If your reading is heavily weighted toward fiction, here’s what nonfiction can teach you.

It can teach you about structure. The best nonfiction writers are brilliant architects of information. They have to be, because their material doesn’t come pre-organized into a plot. They have to create a structure that makes complex information comprehensible and engaging. Reading how they do this will make you notice structural choices in fiction that you might otherwise take for granted.

It can teach you about the world. This is obvious, but it’s worth stating. Fiction creates worlds; nonfiction describes the one we live in. Both are valuable. But if you read only fiction, your understanding of how the world actually works is limited to what fiction writers (who are not always well-informed about practical matters) choose to include. Reading history, science, economics, or sociology gives you a denser, more textured understanding of the world that enriches your reading of fiction.

It can teach you about evidence. Good nonfiction argues. It makes claims and supports them. Reading nonfiction trains you to evaluate arguments, to notice when a claim is well-supported and when it isn’t. This skill transfers to fiction, where authors make implicit arguments about human nature, morality, and society. Being able to evaluate those arguments, rather than just absorbing them, makes you a more active and critical reader.

What nonfiction readers can learn from fiction

The exchange goes both ways.

Fiction teaches empathy in a way that nonfiction rarely does. When you read a novel, you inhabit another consciousness. You see the world through someone else’s eyes, feel their emotions, follow their reasoning. Psychologists have studied this effect and found that reading literary fiction improves people’s ability to understand others’ mental states. Nonfiction can describe the experience of being someone else. Fiction lets you live it, if only for a few hundred pages.

Fiction teaches you about ambiguity. The best fiction doesn’t resolve neatly. It leaves you with questions, with competing interpretations, with a sense that the world is more complicated than any single explanation can capture. Nonfiction, by its nature, tends toward resolution. It wants to explain, to clarify, to make things understood. Fiction is comfortable with not-understanding, with contradiction, with the irreducible messiness of human experience. Spending time in that space is good for you.

Fiction teaches you about language. The best fiction writers are among the most skilled users of the English language. They attend to rhythm, sound, connotation, and the precise weight of individual words in ways that most nonfiction writers don’t. (There are exceptions; Joan Didion and James Baldwin are nonfiction writers who attended to language as carefully as any novelist.) Reading good fiction attunes your ear to prose style, and that attunement enriches everything you read afterward.

Practical ways to expand your reading

If you’re persuaded that broadening your reading is worth doing, here are some strategies that worked for me.

Alternate. For every book in your comfort zone, read one outside it. If you just finished a literary novel, follow it with a work of popular science. If you just finished a business book, follow it with a short story collection. The alternation keeps you from falling entirely into either zone, and the contrast often makes both books more interesting.

Follow recommendations from people with different tastes. If everyone in your social circle reads the same kinds of books, seek out someone who doesn’t. A friend who reads military history. A colleague who reads romance novels. A family member who reads science fiction. Ask them for their single favorite book in their genre, and start there. The books people love most are usually the best entry points.

Let one book lead to another. This is my favorite method. When you read a nonfiction book that mentions a novel, read the novel. When you read a novel set in a historical period you know nothing about, read a history of that period. Let curiosity pull you across boundaries rather than forcing yourself to cross them on principle. The reading will feel more natural because it’s driven by genuine interest.

After reading Echoes of Iron, several readers told us they went and read the historical sources James Whitfield drew on. And readers of The Cartographer’s Dilemma have told us that David Okonkwo’s writing sent them to novels about exploration and colonialism that they never would have found otherwise. That chain reaction, one book leading to another across categories, is how the best reading lives are built.

Read short things in unfamiliar genres before committing to full-length books. If you’ve never read science fiction, start with a Ted Chiang story collection rather than a 900-page space opera. If you’ve never read memoir, start with a long essay by an author whose voice appeals to you. A short, excellent introduction to a genre is better than a long, mediocre one, because it shows you what the genre is capable of at its best.

Visit your local independent bookstore and ask for help. (I wrote a whole separate piece about why booksellers are so good at this.) Tell them you usually read X and want to try Y. They’ll have suggestions. Their suggestions will almost certainly be better than anything an algorithm would surface, because they’ll be tailored to you rather than to a statistical profile.

The risk of discomfort

I should acknowledge that reading outside your comfort zone is, by definition, uncomfortable. You’ll encounter styles that feel alien. You’ll read books that don’t work for you. You’ll start things you don’t finish. This is normal, and it’s not a failure. Not every book in an unfamiliar genre will be your thing. The point isn’t to love everything you read. It’s to give yourself the chance to discover things you love that you didn’t know existed.

When I first started reading popular science, I bounced off several books before finding the writers whose style clicked for me. The first mystery novel I tried felt formulaic and frustrating. The second was a revelation. The third was forgettable. That’s a normal pattern. Don’t judge a genre by its worst examples, and don’t give up after one bad experience.

There’s also the discomfort of encountering perspectives that challenge your own. This is different from genre discomfort, and it’s more valuable. Reading books by people whose experiences and worldviews are different from yours is uncomfortable because it forces you to confront the limits of your own perspective. This discomfort is productive. It’s the feeling of your mind expanding, which is not always a pleasant sensation in the moment but is reliably worthwhile in retrospect.

What this looks like on our list

One of the things we try to do at ScrollWorks is publish books that themselves cross boundaries, making it easier for readers to follow.

Elena Marsh’s Still Waters is a memoir, but its prose is so carefully crafted that fiction readers find it immediately congenial. If you’ve never read memoir, this is a gentle entry point because the writing operates in a register that literary fiction readers will recognize.

David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma is nonfiction about science and culture, but it reads with the narrative momentum of a good novel. Several readers have told us it was the first nonfiction book they’d read in years, and that it changed their assumptions about what nonfiction could be.

Catherine Voss’s The Last Archive is literary fiction, but it engages with questions about knowledge and preservation that will appeal to readers of idea-driven nonfiction. If you usually read books about ideas and rarely read novels, this is a novel that will feel intellectually satisfying in the way you’re accustomed to.

We don’t publish these books because they’re genre-crossing. We publish them because they’re good. But the genre-crossing nature of our list is something we’re aware of and glad about, because we believe that the most interesting books are the ones that refuse to stay in their lane.

A last thought

Three years into my expanded reading life, I still read mostly literary fiction. That’s still my home base, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having one. The difference is that I now leave home regularly. I read science writing, history, memoir, the occasional thriller, and whatever my friends insist I try. My reading life is messier and less coherent than it used to be. It’s also richer.

I think the richness comes from the connections. When you read across categories, you start to see links that are invisible within a single genre. A novel about family secrets connects to a psychology book about intergenerational trauma, which connects to a history of immigration, which connects to a poetry collection about home and displacement. Each connection deepens your understanding of all the books in the chain.

Reading is not a competition and it’s not a performance. It’s a way of being alive, of paying attention to the world and the people in it. The wider your attention, the more you see. It’s that simple.

Written by Sarah Chen, Senior Editor at ScrollWorks Media.