When I began writing here I believed reading was collaboration. Sartre’s word. The writer offers and the reader completes.

What I didn’t anticipate was how much of reading is loss. Books I loved that left nothing behind. Books I discarded that lingered unexpectedly. The unread shelves that sometimes shaped my library more than the read ones. Somewhere in the middle years of this blog I stopped writing about what books meant and started writing about what they did: to attention, to time, to the way a morning feels after a particular chapter.

Now I’m not sure reading is collaboration at all. It may be closer to an exposure. You sit with a book and something passes between you; afterwards you are slightly different, and you cannot say how. The inability to say how is not a failure but the point.