I want to make the case for reading a book more than once before you decide what you think of it. Not every book — some books yield everything on the first reading and are complete in that single encounter. But any book that made you uncertain, that you found difficult or strange or uncomfortable, deserves a second reading before you dismiss it.

I read If on a winter's night a traveler by Calvino and was confused and irritated. I read it again three years later and it was one of the funniest and most technically brilliant novels I'd encountered. The first reading I was fighting the book. The second reading I understood what the book was fighting — the conventions of the reader-novel relationship — and I was on its side.

A second reading is a test of whether the difficulty is productive or just difficult.