“I was lucky enough not to face any required summer reading lists until I went to college. So I still think of summer as the best time to read for fun.”

“Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned ar”