When the judges for the Booker Prize 2003 announced their shortlist this week, they brought to a close the most gruelling — though not, because they still must find a winner, the most difficult — part of their task: choosing six from 117 novels, all read in the five months since April.

Some of those books, including the 23 on the long list, they read at least twice. Someone has probably calculated the average number of novels consumed by the average reader in an average lifetime; one wonders how these figures compare.

As one of those judges, the experience of surveying so much contemporary fiction in such a concentrated way has confirmed for me a long-held belief. It is that reading is one of the essentials — not merely one of the appurtenances or amenities — of the good life. For it is not just the familiar pleasures that come from responsive reading that matter, but the effects of these on how we live our lives, and what kinds of communities we accordingly create.

This point is not always fully appreciated, so I take Wittgenstein’s advice to “assemble reminders” and tell lecture audiences (under the title “Why it is OK to read novels in the morning”) that reading is more than they think it is.

The point at issue can be made in connection with other narrative forms too. But novels are the paradigm because reading is an especially focused experience, unfolding in private time, and that makes a fundamental difference. A play cannot be stopped and reprised in the way that pages can be reread, whether to relish something good or understand something better. A novel is all present at once, and can be gone over and back, re-entered, skimmed, sampled or devoured, just as required. This adds to the value of its benefits. But it is the benefits that matter most.

Obviously enough, many novels do not aspire to do more than amuse, please, offer escape and refreshment. But even at this modest level of ambition they provide several significant opportunities to anyone who will read attentively. One is the opportunity to consider one’s own experience, seeing in the mirror of the story reflections of one’s world, and the universal aspects of oneself, at the revealing angles that result from seeing them refracted into other guises.

Another is the opportunity to peer into experiences one has not had, and might well never have, in other lives and other ways of life. This opportunity is immeasurable. Being restricted to personal experience and the observation only of people in one’s immediate circle is no bar to becoming perceptive and wise. But being a fly on the wall in a far wider array of times and places, observing very different lives and thereby having the chance to spectate, and perhaps even sympathise with choices and desires that had never occurred to one, or are not part of one’s own repertoire: that is the gift that comes from thoughtful reading even of averagely good novels. The better the novel, the richer the possibilities it offers in this as in all its other dimensions (of pleasure-giving and the like). Perhaps “great literature” is literature which, among its other qualities, best discloses to us different worlds, or deeper aspects of our own world, and teaches us how to feel more generously, discriminate more finely, and understand more comprehensively, as a result.

These things matter for a special reason: they promise an enlargement of our sympathies. That, to repeat, is by far not the only thing novels do for us, and it is not the only way our sympathies can be educated and expanded; but it is an exceedingly powerful way, and throughout human history story telling has been a central means of informing people about possibilities beyond their personal sphere, and inviting them to understand those possibilities better.

And the enlargement of our sympathies matters crucially, because sympathy is the basis of moral community. To sympathise with others is to understand their interests, needs and choices, and to see these as relevant to decisions about one’s own choices. It is also, and more, to see others as having a claim on one’s concern, just as one expects to be taken into account by others in turn. When these mutualities are in place, society functions far better than just adequately. Because reading promotes insight into oneself and others, it thereby helps promote the good life in the good society.