Election season puts into perspective just how polarized the United States’ political parties have become, but, according to researchers Andrew Piper and Richard Jean So, we can bridge this divide through books.

“Conventional wisdom,” the researchers write in the Guardian, “supported by a spate of recent studies, tells us that literature and books are precisely the things that divide conservatives and liberals: conservatives are ‘illiterate’ while liberals are ‘well read.’ Could we find evidence to the contrary?”

To answer that question, the researchers studied readers’ behaviors through the website Goodreads.com, which is used by 55 million readers to list books they’ve read or books they would like to read, and post reviews of books. They then identified readers’ political affiliation by looking for reviews of two hundred specific books with an indisputably partisan bent, which narrowed their pool of readers to a little under 28,000. Using only the books labeled “fiction” or “literature,” the researchers used a statistical test to find out whether there were books that were more likely to be on a “conservative” shelf than on a “liberal” shelf, and vice versa.

The initial results confirm the aforementioned stereotypes: conservatives prefer low-brow genre fiction, while democrats prefer high-brow novels and classics. However, more than 400 books did appear on both types of readers’ shelves—indicating some level of cultural unity—including Animal Farm, Dante’s Inferno, Romeo and Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird, and 1984, to name a few. (See the top 100 “bridge” books.)

To find out what makes these books “non-partisan,” the researchers analyzed how readers respond to the books. “What we found was surprising: when both conservatives and liberal readers talk about ‘bridge books’ instead of their usual partisan books, they change their way of talking and thinking in significant ways,” Piper and So write. “They use less negative or hateful language. They use more words related to cognitive insight, such as ‘admit’ and ‘explain.’ In short, what is special about these books is that they make readers who otherwise have strong political dispositions become less tribal. When people read these books, they embrace a more tolerant worldview.”

Related reading: A recently discovered essay by T. S. Eliot is prescient in light of the election: “Somehow I have not felt since last March that I ever wanted to see America again. Certainly at the present time I think I should feel like an adult among children. Probably I shall get over this dread in time.”

Image Credit: Penguin Books