On the question of what reading does for empathy: the research is conflicted but the claim is this — reading literary fiction exposes you to interior lives that are not your own, and this exposure develops your capacity to model other people's perspectives. This is the empathy argument for reading, and it has been made seriously and challenged seriously.

I'm skeptical of the strong version of the claim. Reading has not visibly made all readers more empathetic. Many avid readers are terrible at perspective-taking in daily life. The mechanism, if it exists, doesn't automatically transfer.

The weak version of the claim seems right to me: reading literary fiction provides access to interior lives that you wouldn't otherwise encounter, and this access is valuable, and it can develop empathy under the right conditions — if the reader is attending rather than extracting, if the book is doing real character work rather than sentiment.