Reading Zadie Smith’s essays on authors like Nabokov and Eliot and Kafka, I am plagued by a question that, as an aspiring writer, I am a bit embarrassed by. And yes, I do call myself an ‘aspiring writer’, not because I haven’t written or I have just started writing, but more because I haven’t written the things that I want to that would enable me, at least in my head, to consider myself an established writer. Like an actual book. Anyway, I distract easily. The question that that bothers me, when it makes its distant presence felt is: do I really want to read the books she references to get...

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