If you're the type to ask that question, let me ask you one: why do you read? Because you have to for school? Because you're told you should? Because you enjoy it? If you enjoy it, why do you enjoy it?
A truly good story offers you a new perspective, whether on life in general or on something specific. It does that by drawing you into the lives of the characters, so that you are less of an impassive observer and more of someone who's involved. That way, it affects you emotionally and therefore sticks in your brain.
If an author writes in a way that he is telling you what is happening more than showing it happening, or telling you how a character feels more than showing how she feels, he shores up the wall between you in reality and the story in fiction. You can learn new perspectives that way, I suppose, but it's hardly effective. It's simply a story that isn't real, a temporary investment of time and maybe emotions that soon resets itself as you return to your daily life. So what good did reading that book do you? Could you argue that it affected you in any way?
People typically learn lessons a lot better the hard way. Tell a toddler not to touch the hot stove as many times as you want, but they won't believe you until they burn their finger. Tell a teenager not to stay up too late night after night, but it won't strike home until they get embarrassed in class for snoring during a lecture. Tell your friend that their intense studying for a test is worth missing a night out, but they won't feel completely vindicated until they get the satisfaction from a good grade. Lessons dig in when emotions accompany them.
Scenes and characters from books provide [the literary] with a sort of iconography by which they interpret or sum up their own experience. --C.S. Lewis
If you don't emotionally invest a reader in the characters of a story, nothing you're trying to say through that story will hang around in their mind after they're finished. Tell them everything they need to know, and they'll nod and move on.
Yanking them from their sprawl on the couch and plopping them down in the midst of your scene will make them start thinking about the motivation of the characters, what they did right or wrong, and even what the reader herself might do in the same situation. After all, they're in it.
Snack food books are fine if you want to get lost in other people's conflicts or worlds. But if you want to get a point across, there has to be a rawness behind it; no separation between the characters' emotion and the readers'. No buffer.
You don't get another perspective by looking at someone different than you. You get it from placing yourself beside them or "in their shoes," as the proverbial saying goes. You directly relate their feelings and circumstances to yours. That doesn't come from disinterested staring.
If you're a writer, stop telling your readers what's going on - shove it in their face.
If you're a reader, don't think you're getting the "full experience" by reading stories that tell you everything. Search for the stuff that moves you, that gets you inspired or angry or wistful. You might just learn something about yourself as you learn about the lives of others...even if they're not real.