To read literature is to love it

From The New Yorker: “The world of books is a romantic world. Romance structures literary life, and to be a reader is, often, to follow its choreography, from susceptibility and discovery (‘I just saw it there in the bookstore!’) to infatuation, intimacy, identification, and obsession. We connect with books in an intellectual way, but the most valuable relationships we have with them are emotional; to say that you merely admire or respect a book is, on some level, to insult it. It can be hard to imagine a way of relating to literature that doesn’t involve loving it. Without all those emotions, what would reading be?”