I Don’t Read to Like

“What do you like to read?” It’s a perfectly reasonable question, but it always makes me flinch. I am a reader — that is my identity before anything else, including writer, partner, or mother — but I have no idea how to answer that question.

First of all, just right off the bat, the question assumes that I am a coherent person from moment to moment with a consistent and legible taste in literature. That I chase after books which satisfy some sort of personal criteria for literary bliss, and as I read, I measure the pages in front of me against this ruler. Fair enough. One of my friends looks for books about messy, tangled family dynamics that end with by . Another only reads books with a strong sense of place: by or by . A third prefers introspective or philosophical novels with a spiritual dimension: by . They wield these criteria like extensions of their names: “I am the one who reads [fill in the blank].” But I have no — and I mean such criteria. I’ll read anything.