I agree with the opinion that reading code is not like reading literature but I do find it useful to compare the 2 things. The book "The Psychology of Computer

I agree with the opinion that reading code is not like reading literature but I do find it useful to compare the 2 things. The book "The Psychology of Computer Programming" talks about how most good novelists actually read lots of novels while amateur novelists naively think they have enough inspiration without reading ideas written by others. And the same thing happens with programming, most really good programmers have read a lot of code in addition to writing code. I have found this to be the case for myself, the more code I read the more creative inspiration I have available when writing my own code.