I was at a dinner party a few weeks ago at the home of an impressive reader and amongst other impressive readers. At some point my sense of inadequacy got the better of me and I made a joke about how I don’t really read much at all. Another dinner guest exclaimed, ‘Me too!’ and we raised our wine glasses like we’d seen done in television shows and movies. Later that evening, the conversation turned to some books that were published recently and, of course, I had a liquored opinion on every single one. The person sitting across from me said, ‘I thought you said you didn’t read?’ and I had nothing to say in response. I think my feelings of inadequacy around reading come from the same place as my feelings of inadequacy around living. There’s just so much out there to see and do and read and know that it’s hard not to feel small in the face of it. It is not that I don’t read. I do read: I read signs, menus, recipes, articles, tweets, advice, essays, pages out of magazines, poems, text messages, emails, nutrition labels on food and, occasionally, I read books. I read, yes, but I also breathe, and I also eat, and I sleep, and I write, and I water my plants.

But books are different. Books feel different. It seems that my life revolves around whichever book I am reading at any given time. I often surprise myself by how quickly I can turn any conversation towards whatever I read about last, and my writing and reading lives are inseparable to the point where I often don’t remember writing an essay or a short story, but I do remember what I was reading when I wrote it. I find myself dwelling on this feeling of inadequacy around books specifically, as opposed to reading more generally: there’s so much that I don’t know, so many books that I haven’t read, so many books that I’ll never read.