The experience of reading at the same time as someone you love — not the same book, but in the same room, in the same silence — is one I find worth preserving deliberately. The shared silence is different from the ordinary silence of a room. It's a silence organized around attention, and the attention is mutual even though its objects are different.

My partner and I read together three or four evenings a week. We don't discuss what we're reading during these sessions. Sometimes we discuss it afterward. Sometimes we don't. The practice has been continuous for eight years and it is the habit I most want to keep.

I mention this not as a prescription but as a report. Reading can be a shared activity in this indirect sense, where the sharing is not of the book but of the time and the quality of attention.