I want to talk about the specific pleasure of reading a book you didn't choose — a book that was pressed into your hands by someone who said you needed it. The books I've been handed this way are different from the books I've sought out. The seeking is itself a kind of framing. Being given a book clears that framing away.

The best book I was ever given without context was Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, which is a novella about the German Romantic poet Novalis. I had no interest in German Romanticism and would never have picked it up. It is 224 pages and one of the most perfectly constructed works of fiction I've read.

The lesson is not that I should always be passive about what I read. It's that the act of recommendation by someone who knows you is itself information about the book. They saw something in it that they thought would matter to you. That prior interpretation changes the reading.