Every once in a while I get interested enough in a writer that I decide to read “everything” he or she has written.

(No literally everything, perhaps, but a lot!)

This started in college, when I discovered that the college library often had volumes of letters or collected essays written by novelists that I was studying. I remember reading a collection of letters by Dostoyevski over one Christmas break, and a collection of essays by Virginia Woolf. It gave me a sense of connectedness with the novelists — with the human beings behind the novels. Continue reading →