I will repeat the following until everyone listens:

The reading of literature has little, if anything, to do with empathy. If "empathy" is your explanation for why books are important to you, you probably need to pay closer attention to what is actually going on, when you read.

The idea of "empathy" as an account of literary experience is a modern bowdlerization of Aristotle's account of how plots work.

Aristotle tells us we perceive a form and judge it in terms of good and evil. Which is correct and cannot be interpreted in terms of "empathy."

But Aristotle gives simply a limit, genre-specific account of a general human practice called reason.

Reason involves perceiving a form (a truth-idea), which necessarily entails understanding it fully in itself and its relations (which will include its goodness necessarily).

Here arises the relative the superiority of Plato's more general account of perceptions of beauty (which may include works of fine art):

Every perception of a form is an enrichment of the intellect and hence of one's being.

Now that this is on Twitter, I can just retweet every time I see another stupid essay on "the importance of literature because . . . empathy."