I guess I grew up with reading being advocated as a kind of healthy habit, as if just by reading you are engaging in a kind of exercise for your mind. I'm not really that skeptical that reading can be helpful cognitively, and maybe more importantly, to contribute to one's vocabulary and education, but I can't help but wonder sometimes if what we read really makes a difference – are there more or less healthy reading diets?
For example I know a lot of adults who mostly read young-adult literature (think fantasy novels aimed at teenagers). Does this kind of diet lead to the same cognitive and educational benefits as reading works of literature, or even just reading non-fiction (maybe something like popular science or history books)?
I would just assume that reading more dense, academic, and technical works are going to have the most information and thus benefit the most to education; likewise, literary works (thinking here of both historical and more contemporary works like those by David Foster Wallace and Cormac McCarthy) are more likely to contribute to vocabulary than more "popular" / general audience works of fiction. Reading Blood Meridian really opened my eyes to how many words there are to describe landscapes – I had no idea, and if I had been able to afford the time I probably would have spent a lot more effort and time on looking up and learning those words better.
I guess I'm curious about whether there is any empirical evidence about this, as I occasionally read headlines about studies about the benefits of reading, and I wonder if any of them make these kinds of distinctions about reading diet being important to the benefits of reading.
by pastry_puff_9000