Books gnaw at me from around the edges of my life, demanding more time and attention. I am always left hungry.

This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal.

To whom do books belong? The books we read and the books we write are both ours and not ours. They're also theirs.

Whenever one of us introduced an old favorite, we savored the other's first delight like a shared meal eaten with a newly acquired gusto, as if we'd never truly tasted it before.