I’ll give you that there is a distinct difference between books read when you’re young, the kind that inform not just your mental landscape but its architecture, the things about the world that you believe to me true, and the kind that you love as an adult for their style and sentences, their ability to reflect on and perhaps clarify the world you already know. I loved a million embarrassing books as a child and adolescent, and was sometimes influenced by the worst ones: it took me years to recognize that a prepubsecent sprint through Atlas Shrugged (reported to be Taylor Hanson’s favorite book!) had left me with a taste for strong-willed, fragile-boned women looking to be dominated by cruelly ambitious men, both in literature and in life. There are happier examples— it’s unclear whether I owe my interest in back-to-the-landing to having grown up on Little House in the Big Woods or whether it served as an early indicator of what kind of person I was going to grow up to be. In any event: it is true that nothing is ever quite a part of you the way those books are, the ones you read when you didn’t have words for certain things just yet. They became your words; they are part of your own private language and the world you build yourself into.

But it happens that I do love Roberto Bolano and David Foster Wallace just as passionately and personally, if differently, than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Ender’s Game; if that makes me seem pretentious, too bad, I guess. Those books wrangle my adult interest in Literature as a field of study, my education in theory, and manage to be a part of my life, too; I stayed up as many nights with Infinite Jest as with any of the Harry Potter books. I can’t help but think that staring into our wineglasses and lying about this stuff contributes to the boredom and despair experienced by so many when approaching Serious Authors; when we cordon off books from one another, we set ourselves up for disappointment and frustration. I hated Ulysses because I read it in a seminar, inching through the pages, looking up the references. DFW includes his own footnotes, so that even the formal stuff is always drawing you back into the text, the whole thing atomized and frayed and gloriously connected, a fractal form infinitely divisible, perfectly complete. There’s plenty of plot in IJ— my favorite Infinite Summer post is about how the ETA scenes could be excised into a YA novel— plus all of the serious lit-crit stuff a student could ever want or need.

Which is a very long way of saying that we love what we love, and we shouldn’t ever lie about it, especially when those things are books, which are the closest non-human things to my own little heart. And that we probably shouldn’t judge what others love and have loved and have been shaped by, because what sounds pretentious and boring to you was sort of lifesaving to me, in the same way that Harry Potter was for Michelle Dean, once. And that we should stop lying to one another at dinner parties, definitely, because why bother having these conversations at all if we’re not interested in what someone else actually has to say?