A naive, excitable teenaged reader is a beautiful thing. Someone who’s never heard of Elizabeth Bennet or Jay Gatsby, until you tell him. And they all still believe in truth. That’s the fun of it.

Sometimes there were kids who were simply born to be thirty, or fifty, or seventy; I could see their unfinished teenaged faces overlaid with the transparencies of their aged selves and had to resist telling...

Every year, when we finished Gatsby, I read the last page aloud. Also, every year, I wept… I almost looked forward to it. Crying once a year is probably necessary… it was involuntary, almost external,...