Read this essay the other day about book selection and (deeply) personal reading habits, and this section stopped me dead:

As Pierre Bayard theorizes in How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (a book whose mordant wisdom is not captured by that inapt title), reading must always entail loss. Bayard is about as far away from Roland Barthes’s plaisir du texte as a Frenchman can get. For him, we are forever searching for a book that can never precisely match our own “inner book,” what he calls a “phantasmagorical object that every reader live to pursue, of which the best books he encounters in his life will be but imperfect fragments, compelling him to continue reading.” And, for some of us, to begin writing.

Wowee! I read those last two lines about five times in a row. So beautifully articulated. I’d never thought about it that way before, but it’s true, isn’t it? Every time I read a synopsis that’s not quite right or quite enough, or a full novel that falls short, the yardstick I’m measuring it against must be some formless book that lives within me. I’m always hoping that someone else has given it perfect form.

But then again, how disappointing it would be to find that book, and have the search come to an end!