Why do we read anything? I can’t really answer that question. I don’t know why you are reading this and not something else, or why the other day I finally read Montaigne’s essay on thumbs, which had been recommended to me months ago. But I do know that we tell teen-agers to read “Romeo and Juliet” and “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” direct new medical students to “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” send someone who has lost a spouse a copy of C. S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed,” and give newlyweds Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift from the Sea.” Certain books are associated with certain ages, others with certain life events. I suppose what we read is shaped by geography, too—so much so that we pick up Joan Didion or Wallace Stegner if we are headed West, and copies of Jesmyn Ward or William Faulkner if we are headed South.
