We are what we read.
It plays both ways of course because there comes a time when we read only what we want too because that seduces our assumptions. But a good deal of how we view the world comes through ideas we may not have had ourselves when we were young, thoughts and opinions that lit a lamp in our brains and sent us on our merry way.
When I was in my mid-twenties I read The Faerie Queen by Spencer followed by Don Quixote by Cervantes (original Smollett translation) and this still remains a highlight of my reading. The quality of Spencer’s imagination is superb and his ability to think in sonnets impressive. Not the least his whole book exposing the Court scene of Elizabethan England is both joyous and sad.
The perfect counter to his knightly jousts was Cervantes who mocks and breaks the heart at the same time. Who makes fun of the knightly saga and his readers at the same time, by exposing us to the deep desire that Quixote was actually right and that what he saw of the world, not for its magicians and giants, but for its heart, were the true daily experience of us all.
It isn’t fiction when it touches what we have come to call, your soul.