When I was a teenager, I read the longest, most complex books I could find. I spent months trying to decode Finnegans Wake, slogging through In Search of Lost Time, finding Tristram Shandy hysterical, looking up all the references in Gravity’s Rainbow, and marking the margins of my copy of The Waves with so many notes that it became its own kind of illuminated text. In 1995, I remember going to the bookstore the second it opened on the day […]