Where I'm Reading From

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I’D JUST LIKE to thank everybody who made this book what it is. Above all Hugh Eakin for all his thoughtful input and editing on every single piece, then Robert Silvers of course, Rea Hederman, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, and all the team at The New York Review of Books. Books are a joint effort. Many many thanks.

IT’S TIME TO rethink everything. Everything. What it means to write and what it means to write for a public—and which public. What do I want from this writing? Money? A career? Recognition? A place in the community? A change in the government? World peace? Is it an artifice, is it therapy? Is it therapy because it is an artifice, or in spite of that? Does it have to do with constructing an identity, a position in society? Or simply with entertaining myself, with entertaining others? Will I still write if they don’t pay me?

And what does it mean to read? Do I want to read the things other people are reading, so I can talk to them? Which other people? Why do I want to talk to them? So that I can be of my time? Or so that I can know other times, other places? Do I read things to confirm my vision of the world, or to challenge it? Or is reading to challenge my vision a reassuring confirmation that I am indeed the courageous guy I thought I was? The more challenging the books I read the more complacent I feel.

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