We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally importa… - Maureen Corrigan

“Mr. Wonderful isn’t just going to knock on the door,” a girlfriend once said, chiding me. “Why not?” I thought. That’s the way people often meet in books—effortlessly, without guile or strategizing.

In our daily lives, where we’re bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small.

As Richard Rodriguez points out in his beautiful and incisive memoir Hunger of Memory, when academics now talk on about race, class, and gender, what they’re usually talking about is race and gender.