That's what reading was for my mother, and became for me - a way to escape, a private time machine, a place that began with moral instruction but soon morphed into empathy and imagination.

It was disconcerting for the novel to seem so different when I re-read it. Of course we are a different person each time we open a book to read it again we can never really experience it in the same way, just as we can never step into the same stream twice.

True browsing means that we discover shelves and subjects that we could not have anticipated when we started. And the books we read introduce us to other books, as if we are at a magnificent party of the mind, being ever welcomed by new friends to join in the conversation.