"Once you have taken possession of a book, you can inspect a writer's mind, in all its shades and dimensions. You can establish a relationship, which would be intolerable to a living individual: you can wake the writer at three in the morning, switch her off in mid-sentence, insist she continues for six hours unbroken, skip, go back, repeat the same paragraph again and again, impertinently second-guessing her vocabulary, and metaphors, scrutinizing her structure and tricks.
But a book is not a genie bottle, and the writer is not a slave-mind under your command. The writer remains always autonomous, never quite obedient to your expectation or understanding. At first, you might flatter yourself that you have developed an indecorous intimacy. I have even fancied I had caught a reference which no one else had caught - as though George Eliot had shared a private joke, with me and only me, over a distance of a century. But when I tried to keep up with her, follow her into her most inaccessible passages, press my mind into hers, burrow into the ions and synapses of her sub-cervical cortex, I could never quite possess her."
Rory Stewart, from The Pleasure of Reading: 43 Writers on the Discovery of Reading and the Books that Inspired Them
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