Great post @JaninaDuszejko ! You've put your finger on one big thing that annoyed me about both EO and Crawdads, namely the characters' implausibly quick recovery from trauma. I also agree totally with what you say about how reading fiction (and sometimes also nonfiction) can immerse you in someone else's world. So reading can make you more emotionally intelligent as well as better informed.
I'm greatly enjoying this whole discussion of what people read. On one level, obviously, it's very much a matter of taste. 'Litfic' is generally what I read and like, but I'm very aware that litfic is only one genre among others. And some types of litfic I find too pretentious and navel-gazing (books that make it to the Booker Prize shortlist, I'm looking at you!). That said, most friends I know in real life prefer less lit-ficcy, more commercialised fiction than I do. My SIL, for example, reads masses of fiction, but there's very little cross-over in her tastes and mine. So I love the 50-Booker threads because there are loads of people here who share my reading tastes. These MN threads are probably more skewed towards readers of litfic. That said, 50-Bookers read and review all kinds of books, and I've definitely been inspired to read books I wouldn't have read otherwise, due to the reviews on here. For instance, I might actually have to go off and read Captain Corelli now, gasp!
I firmly believe that people should read whatever they enjoy, regardless of how popular or unpopular it is the Daily Fail excepted of course.
The literary critic Roland Barthes in his book S/Z argued that there are two types of books, the readerly text versus the writerly text ('texte lisible' and 'texte scriptible'). Readerly texts according to Barthes are more predictable and easier to understand, so you read them passively and they bring you pleasure ('plaisir'). Writerly texts on the other hand are more demanding and don't present their interpretation to you on a platter; you have to actively work to make sense of them. Writerly texts therefore turn the reader into a co-author, and while reading these texts is more challenging, it's also more rewarding, and you experience not just pleasure but bliss ('jouissance').
So make of that theory what you will, ha. Personally I find it quite helpful, because yes, sometimes more demanding books are more rewarding. That said, I don't always want to be an active reader; sometimes I just want to be a passive one, and lose myself in a story without having to think about it too hard.
I would also say that quite a few books that initially look like 'readerly' books turn out to be 'writerly' ones, if you think about them some more. Barthes' theory is also quite elitist I would say. For centuries, books written for a primarily female audience were seen as less worthwhile and less literary, whereas in fact this view involved a lot of implicit sexism (if women are enjoying a book, it must not be very good!).
Another thing is that in my RL book club, some of the books I consider less 'good' from a literary point of view are the ones that we've had the best discussions about.
I feel like posting Daniel Pennac's excellent 'Rights of the Reader' list, even though everyone has probably seen them before!