Books are the greatest companions, confessors, confidantes, tutors, a source of pleasure, a cure for loneliness, and to find one, in the middle of an island in Tahiti, in the heart of the Moroccan desert, or at an airport where one is stranded for a night, is to find the friend who reminds us we are not alone.

Count yourself lucky…You’re still promising until your first book’s out.

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.

Chapter books were my salvation, in the same way as Jesus was for other kids. Our family was always broke, but my parents always shelled out our version of a monthly bar bill for Scholastic paperbacks. Thank you, Astrid Lindgren; when you gave us Pippi Longstocking, you gave me life. I read the book like I read the first issue of Ms. magazine ten years later. The experience was like Helen Keller breaking the code for the word ‘water.’ I wanted to race around spreading the good news. I could breathe again, forever. There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable.

Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it; and if they did not have access to his popular De Copia, they consulted printed models or the local schoolmaster. The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end (unless they are digital natives and click through texts on machines), early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

I’d like somebody to write a book that really told the truth about life now. Leo Tolstoy but with drive-through windows.

When I got home from school I did what I had always done, which was to read, curled up in the window seat in the library or lying flat on my back on the floor with my feet in a chair, in the darkest corner I could find. The house was full of places to read that fitted me like a glove, and I read the same books over and over. Children tend to derive comfort and support from the totally familiar—an umbrella stand, a glass ashtray backed with brightly colored cigar bands, the fire tongs, anything. With the help of these and other commonplace objects—with the help also of the two big elm trees that shaded the house from the heat of the sun, and the trumpet vine by the back door, and the white lilac bush by the dining-room window, and the comfortable wicker porch furniture and the porch swing that contributed its creak…creak…to the sounds of the summer night—I got from one day to the next.

There are 15 floors of stacks with 64 rows of books per floor, running about 25 feet each; 6 or 7 shelves in each row. Can you actually browse there, find books on your own, faced with the dark phalanxes? You can, once you get subject areas in your head. Having made enough spot searches, you grasp the logic of each floor. There are no signs to help you, only diagrams with codes and numbers. You can also create luck in any given spot: You turn your head to the opposing row of books. A different subject area can arise, perhaps only partly to do with your areas of interest. This is non-link-based browsing. You can discover, instead of being endlessly sought.

If poetry was a rope, then the books themselves were rafts. At my most precarious I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.

The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

There’s no question but that much of what is published in this country is cotton candy and that this cluttering-up of the bookstores damages writers. To say nothing of what such a diet does to the brain’s stomach, if you’re a reader. But you can’t complain about this too much; it’s a pluralism that allows R. Crumb and Walter Benjamin and William Gaddis and Julia Child all to live in paperback heaven together.