Like a Good Neighbor, A Book Is Always There

William Faulkner

In my book ROMAN Reading: 5 Practical Skills for Transforming Your Life through Literature, I mention that reading a book is like talking with a neighbor. William Faulkner expresses this idea in the following quote:

The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes–Don Quixote. I read that every year, as some do the Bible….I’ve read these books so often that I don’t always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character just as you’d meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.

I never really enjoyed the Faulkner I read in college, probably because I didn’t really understand it. But anyone who read Don Quixote every year is worth a second chance. I’ll have to put The Sound and the Fury or Go Down, Moses on my “to read” list.