reading in all its glory

For while it can be many things, serious reading is above all an agency of self-making.

Fully engaged, we work with the writer to build our own book.

Great books, like life, are participatory exercises in which you cannot sit passively on the sidelines.

It is easy enough in retrospect to see a book as a screen, a shield, an escape, but at the time there was just the magic—the startling and renewable discovery that a page covered with black markings could, with a slight mental exertion, be converted into an environment, an inward depth populated with characters and animated by diverse excitements.

As the world hurtles on toward its mysterious rendezvous, the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise.