I've started treating my reading life as having distinct eras, and I find this helpful for understanding what I'm getting from books at different periods. There's the era of adolescent discovery — reading for the first time what adults were doing, figuring out what fiction could contain. There's the era of education — reading to develop a vocabulary for talking about what I was experiencing. There's the era of depth — rereading, annotating, following obsessions.

I think I'm now in the era of what I'd call 'reading as witness.' The books I choose now are often the ones that are bearing witness to something — an experience, a history, a way of being in the world — that I otherwise wouldn't have access to. I'm reading to know what I don't know.

This is different from reading to acquire information. Witness is not information. It's presence.