the “good reader.” There is the first life of the good reader in gathering information and acquiring knowledge. We are awash in this life. There is the second life, in which reading’s varied forms of entertainment are to be found in abundance: the sheer distraction and exquisite pleasure of immersion—in stories of other lives; in articles about mysterious, newly discovered exoplanets; in poems that steal our breath away. Whether we choose to escape in bodice-ripping romances; enter the painstakingly re-created worlds in novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, Abraham Verghese, or Elena Ferrante; exercise
...more
