All of my favorite books perform this trick. Initially, they seem to immerse me in another life, but ultimately they immerse me in me; I am looking through the window into another person’s home, but it is my face that I see in the reflection. I imagine, but can never be sure, that everybody feels the same way about books. Tolstoy did. Art is the universal window, he said, a collective view into “the oneness of life’s joys and sorrows.”
