My readership comments to the effect that books are a sort of intermediate but appropriate technology which enables us to share vicariously ideas and experience in an infinitely wider context than would ordinarily be permitted by the immediate place and time in which we live. I think that must be right. In my experience, the enjoyment of a book involves above all entering into a relationship with the author - to the point that you can feel you know them and would even like to have them round for dinner. A good prose style is the equivalent of charm, a sort of literary coquetry which draws the reader in. Inevitably some flatter to deceive. Casting around for an example, one name which springs to mind is Simon Schama. Despite his scintillating writing technique, one is left with a sense of being left undernourished - like an overelaborate cake, all whipped cream and too little pastry. A propos, could I have accidentally stumbled over the origin of the word "tart" (in its vulgar sense)?

So, ideally, a book should be well-enough written for you to like the author and want to go on reading to get to know him better, as it were. It should also be nourishing. It should offer some new insight, a certain deeper understanding of the nature of things, an exploration of ideas as yet unconsidered. Ideally, it will be a vehicule to reveal those unseen truths which are inaccessible to our prosaic workaday minds, calling us to a higher place in ourselves. Looking around my shelves I try to pick out authors that would fit in this latter category: T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, D.T. Suzuki, Solzhenitsyn, Aldous Huxley, Goethe, Baudelaire, Joyce, Meister Eckhart, Maurice Nicoll, Hölderlin, Rilke, Dostoyevsky, Melville, er, Proust... but already I'm straying into the area of "would like to have read", rather than "have been strongly influenced by". Not to worry. Isn't there a Sufi saying to the effect that a man whose intellect is stuffed with information, but whose being remains untouched by the reality of the truth is as a donkey carrying a large load of books? The real question we should be asking is not: How shall I find the time and stamina to read all that stuff? The real, urgent question is: How not to be a donkey?