“Milan Kundera argues that the special virtue of the novel lies in its ability to part the “magic curtain, woven of legends” that hangs between us and the ordinary world. The curtain has been put there to cover up the trivia of our lives, the forgotten old boxes and bags where “an enigma remains an enigma” while ugliness flirts with beauty, and reason courts the absurd. These neglected spaces were redeemed for literature, according to Kundera, at the moment when Cervantes got his readers to imagine Don Quixote as he lay dying while his niece went on eating, the housekeeper went on drinking and Sancho Panza went on being “of good cheer.” By inventing a narrator through whose consciousness such dumb events could be worked up into an affecting “scene,” Cervantes created a form of literature that could do justice to “modest sentiments”; and so a new kind of beauty—Kundera calls it “prosaic beauty”—was born.”

When I was in junior high school there were occasional book fairs, and at one of them a well-meaning parent volunteer, in an effort to help me pick out a book to buy, asked me what kind of books I liked to read. I would have been too embarrassed to say so, even if I had been able to articulate the thought, but what I liked to read were books about me. Preferably books in which I was plucky and daring, two things I was not at all in real life, and in which the other characters could act as substitute friends and companions, two other things also somewhat lacking in my real world. So I told her I liked books about animals.

I’m pretty lazy when it comes to reading about subjects that are not close to home, unless there’s a particular question that’s been nagging me, in which case I’m willing to slog through quite a bit to find the answer. That’s my motivation for reading any books about politics or economics or the state of the world, which lately I’ve done very little of. Mostly, though, I still prefer to read books about me, and by that I mean the work of authors who talk about the mundane minutia that rattles in their head, and who are preferably somewhat cynical and acerbic, and generally lost at sea rather than successful or ambitious. Like me, only more eloquent and interesting, and with a better sense of humor.

It’s all well and good to come across startling insights, but they’re never as satisfying as when you have the sense that you could have come up with them yourself, if only you hadn’t been so dull-witted and hadn’t been devoting ninety percent of your thinking capacity to musing about Billie Joe’s hair, and they’re at their most comforting when you agree with them completely, so much so that you realize you had in fact thought those things all along, but only now that they have been articulated for you on a page have they at last crystallized in your own mind. Frankly, I love it when other people do my thinking for me, and if they can do my feeling and imagining too, well, there’s a writer I can fall in love with.