A Year in Reading: Anita Felicelli
When I was young, I had two types of reading: public reading and private reading. Public reading was reading I accomplished mostly to have something to talk about with other kids at school, while private reading was only for myself. These two lives of mine sat in tension. Why was I reading one thing to talk about, to be part of society, and another thing to experience privately? Unknown. But as writes in , “The privacy of the singular mind, the privacy of consciousness, is one of fiction’s exceptional gifts to us,” and it was always the private reading, the deep one-to-one communion with another mind, that I valued more. This year I read certain books to stay tethered to the world—’s and ’s and ’s—but I also devoted myself with greater intensity to books I read only for the sustenance of my inner life.
