Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were.

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.

Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.