Summer promises us two of life's great joys: escaping home and reading books — joys that are, of course, intimately connected. Books may help us to feel more at home in the world at large- We can relate our experiences to those described in great books written long ago or in distant lands because there are fewer human types than there are people. In the books of others, we find our own thoughts, embarrassments and dramas.

Authors can locate words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, or can express our very own thoughts, but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we could not match. What was shy and confused within us is unapologetically and cogently phrased in them, a congruence all the more striking if the work was written by someone in a far-flung place or in another age. We feel grateful to these strangers for reminding us of who we are. Through reading and travel, we escape the deadening effect of habit. Our eyes are never more open than during our first few days in a new place: except perhaps during our reading of a great book, which guides us to the interest of things we had previously ignored. Our mind is like a radar newly attuned to pick up certain objects floating through consciousness. Our attention is drawn to the shades of the sky, to the changeability of a face, to the hypocrisy of a friend, or to a submerged sadness about a situation that we had previously not even known we could feel sad about.