Reading

There are moments in novels that I remember less for what happened than for what passed between two characters. They stay with me long after other parts of the novel have faded; sometimes even after I have forgotten much of the plot. There is a scene in Anna Karenina I have carried with me for years. Nothing much happens. No one dies, no great confession is made. Two people sit at a table and trace a few letters in chalk. Levin and Kitty have already failed once at understanding each other. Between them now lies everything that has happened since: embarrassment, regret, pride, and all those things we don’t manage to say. ...

I came across the above image today. One of those neat, confident grids listing the “Top 100 novels.” A canon in miniature. Ambitious, serious, well argued. I recognized many of the spines. I have read several of them. Some are better than others. Some mattered deeply at one point in my life and then receded. Others I admire more than I love. Lists like that always tempt us to believe that reading is cumulative, that it works by completion, by coverage. As if one could finish literature. But novels do not really work that way. They are not milestones so much as encounters. And encounters depend on timing, on who one is, on what one is carrying at that moment. ...

There is something to be said about reading fiction—it is fundamentally different from watching TV, movies, Netflix, or scrolling through Twitter and TikTok. When you read, your mind has to make a leap. You convert words—abstract symbols—into images, sensations, and meaning. It is one of the most complex mental operations we’re capable of, and it doesn’t happen passively. You have to train for it. Reading fiction, especially the literary kind, is not effortless consumption; it is deliberate imagination.1 ...