Reading Life: Books for the Ages

Reading, the mind’s traffic in signs and signifiers, is the most dynamic, changeful, and possibly transformational act we can imagine. To have read a work and have been strongly affected by it - and then to come back to it after many years - can be a foundation-shaking enterprise. In Reading Life, virtuoso critic and essayist Sven Birkerts examines what it means to return to resonant works of fiction - the books one thinks of as private properties, the personal signposts of one’s inner life. For Birkerts, these include The Catcher in the Rye, Humboldt’s Gift, To the Lighthouse, and Lolita. In twelve far-reaching and intimate essays, Birkerts reflects upon his first readings and what later encounters reveal about time, memory, and the murmuring transistors of selfhood.