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What remains invariable is the pleasure of reading, of holding a book in my hands and suddenly feeling that peculiar sense of wonder, recognition, chill, or warmth that for no discernible reason a certain string of words sometimes evokes. Reviewing books, translating books, editing anthologies are activities that have provided me with some justification for this guilty pleasure (as if pleasure required justification!) and sometimes even allowed me to make a living. “It is a fine world and I wish I knew how to make £200 a year in it,” wrote the poet Edward Thomas to his friend Gordon Bottomley. Reviewing, translating, and editing have sometimes allowed me to make those two hundred pounds.

Henry James coined the phrase “the figure in the carpet” for the recurrent theme that runs through a writer’s work like a secret signature. In many of the pieces I have written (as reviews or memoirs or introductions) I think I can see that elusive figure: it has something to do with how this art I love so much, the craft of reading, relates to the place in which I do it, to Thomas’s “fine world.” I believe there is an ethic of reading, a responsibility in how we read, a commitment that is both political and private in the act of turning the pages and following the lines. And I believe that sometimes, beyond the author’s intentions and beyond the reader’s hopes, a book can make us better and wiser.

In the “neat speech” returning thanks, I want to acknowledge the generous reading of Ileene Smith and Susan Laity, the careful proofreading of Dan Heaton, and the meticulous indexing of Marilyn Flaig. Also the splendid cover design of Sonia Shannon.

Craig Stephenson, who for the past twenty years has been the first reader of everything I’ve written, suggested the structure, order, and selection for this book (as he did earlier for Into the Looking-Glass Wood, the 1998 volume from which a few of the essays here included were taken, as well as a few of the lines in this preface). He curbed my inclination to keep occasional pieces to which I was attached for sentimental reasons, reminded me of others that I had forgotten but insisted that I revise certain paragraphs or examples that now seemed dated, and spent far more time reflecting on the appropriateness of each piece than I myself, in my impatience, would have done. For this, and for more things than he would ever be willing to acknowledge, my loving thanks.

PART ONE

Who Am I?

“I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.

“You won’t make yourself a bit realer by crying,”

Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about.”

“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous — “I shouldn’t be able to cry.”

“I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?”

Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 4

A Reader in the

Looking-Glass Wood

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6

WHEN I WAS EIGHT OR NINE, in a house that no longer stands, someone gave me a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Like so many other readers, I have always felt that the edition in which I read a book for the first time remains, for the rest of my life, the original one. Mine, thank the stars, was enriched by John Tenniel’s illustrations and was printed on thick, creamy paper that reeked mysteriously of burnt wood.

There was much I didn’t understand in my first reading of Alice, but that didn’t seem to matter. I learned at a very early age that unless you are reading for some purpose other than pleasure (as we all sometimes must for our sins), you can safely skim over difficult quagmires, cut your way through tangled jungles, skip the solemn and boring lowlands, and simply let yourself be carried by the vigorous stream of the tale.

As far as I can remember, my first impression of the adventures was that of a physical journey on which I myself became poor Alice’s companion. The fall down the rabbit hole and the crossing through the looking-glass were merely starting points, as trivial and as wonderful as boarding a bus. But the journey! When I was eight or nine, my disbelief was not so much suspended as yet unborn, and fiction felt at times more real than everyday fact. It was not that I thought that a place such as Wonderland actually existed, but that I knew it was made of the same stuff as my house and my street and the red bricks that were my school.