when I was a child learning to read, I did not think about reading. Like Alice, I simply jumped down reading’s hole into Wonderland and disappeared for most of my childhood. When I was a young woman, I did not think about reading. I simply became Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, and Isabel Archer at every opportunity. Sometimes I became men like Alyosha Karamazov, Hans Castorp, and Holden Caulfield. But always I was lifted to places very far from the little town of Eldorado, Illinois, and always I burned with emotions I could never otherwise have imagined.
