From Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, a collection of essays published next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The other day I was asked a question of fact that I could not answer about a book I had once known well but hadn’t looked at in years. Naturally, I thought that if I just riffled through it, I’d soon have the information that now eluded me. As it happened, the copy of this book that had been sitting on my bookshelf, untouched for decades, was a cheap 1970s paperback that began to fall apart in my hands…