I loved reading before I could read. I have a distinct memory — yes, our memories are subject to lapses and improvisations, but this one has been around so long I can’t doubt it — of myself at perhaps five years old, sitting between my mother and my father, them with their respective books, me holding my own big book full of pictureless pages of small type, turning the pages one by one and scanning them, chuckling or smiling or sighing now and then as my parents did. It seemed an inexpressibly delightful activity. It still does.

So I have read…