This is Book Club. The first rule is that you get at least half the references. The second rule is… you get the idea.

Somewhere down the list: not every book needs to be intellectual.

Reading is culture. It always has been. Writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky were followed like rock stars—not for who they were, but for the ideas. That’s what reading is: its own kind of music—lyrical, but felt differently. It isn’t what people think it is, on either side of the argument.