Read Old, Classic Books

I was once reminded of a movie I had watched two weeks prior and realized I hadn't thought about the movie once since leaving the theater. It occurred to me that this is a good proxy for whether I think the movie or book was worth-while.

Years after, I'm not surprised your recall of details from War and Peace has faded, but I don't think that's necessary for "deep insights". In the 18th and 19th centuries, people thought that reading novels provided exercise for the "moral imagination". Reading a novel or essays that provide an opportunity to turn things around in your mind in a way that yields interesting insights leaves you with something more durable than a plot synopsis.

Reading classics from another language is often easier, because they're periodically translated into more contemporary language that is easy to read instead of frozen in time with unfamiliar prose. Volokhonsky & Pevear have been tearing through the russians the last few decades for example, and their Tolstoy translations are at pretty similar readability to contemporary fiction.

Anyway the thing I appreciate about reading classic books is it gives you the sense of the ways people do and don't change over time and place. A lot of these books are about people inhabiting societies that are completely alien to me, and the social pressures & incentives on them are sometimes nearly incomprehensible. But then I see them being motivated by the same concerns and fears that motivate me, and it deeps my understanding of the core experiences that drive our actions.

And very similarly you see ways where they don't react the way a person my time and culture would, and so also get a sense of what isn't shared, and is more mediated by culture and experience. These insights and the experience gained from assessing them persist long after the details of the novels are forgotten.

This is also an argument for reading contemporary books too. But the details and experiences are different, and each provides things the other doesn't.