Reading contemporary fiction as it's published versus reading it ten years later is a different experience and I'm not sure which is better. Reading it as it's published gives you the conversation — the reviews, the arguments, the cultural moment it arrives into. Reading it ten years later gives you distance from the noise and a clearer view of whether the book itself holds up.

I've been doing both, which is to say I read some things immediately and some things on a deliberate delay. The delay approach has produced some of my best recent reading — I finally read A Little Life, which came out in 2015, and Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, which came out in 2015, both last year. Both benefited from the delay because the conversation had quieted enough to hear the book.

The case for reading immediately is that some books are most alive in the moment of their cultural context — Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life was partly a response to a specific cultural conversation that I understood better by having been in it.