When I was 22 years old and living in Lille [northern France], I once asked my mother to send me a six-volume edition of the gargantuan In Search of Lost Time. Every rainy afternoon or evening was then devoted to working my way through its thousands of pages. To my great chagrin, this undertaking remains unfinished – in fact, I have yet to get beyond Within a Budding Grove. But simply reading Proust transformed me and gave me confidence: I became "someone who reads Proust," which is to say a new man. I still think of myself as someone who will, one day, have read Proust – and even as someone who will reread Proust. (Check back with me next summer, or perhaps the one after!) Seasoned bibliophiles will recognize themselves here.

Like dressing or traveling, reading is ultimately an aspirational activity. It's about reinventing oneself, imagining oneself stronger, more authentic, able to rise above circumstances and take a new lease on the world. In this way, another version of ourselves emerges within: it resembles us, but it is a bit more sophisticated, more interesting, closer to the person we wish to be. And then we strive to shape our real life ever more closely to this ideal. That is how we begin to resemble what the indomitable power of imagination has allowed us to glimpse.

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