What is the last book that you read specifically because someone recommended it to you?

Nobody recommends books to me. I am a hermit, a man who exists outside space and time. I inhabit my own world. It is not a world without traffic or weather or the low-grade irritations of daily life, but a world in which those things arrive already filtered, already subordinated to an inner rhythm that has long since ceased to synchronize with the calendar or the market or whatever book is being praised this week as “urgent.”

When people say, You must read this, they are usually talking to one another, not to me. Recommendation presumes a shared present, a common pulse: the sense that we are all standing in the same moment, looking at the same horizon, worried about the same things. I am not. I am elsewhere—sometimes decades elsewhere—sitting with a sentence that has already survived its own moment and no longer needs witnesses.

Books come to me the way memories do: without announcement, without justification. I do not discover them; they resurface. A line half-remembered suddenly insists on being completed. A voice I have not heard in years clears its throat. I open a book not because it is new but because it has waited. The waiting matters. It means the book has detached itself from fashion and entered a slower orbit, one governed less by relevance than by necessity.

There is a peculiar freedom in this exile. I do not read to keep up, to be conversant, to have opinions ready for deployment. I read to inhabit another consciousness fully, to submit to its tempo, to let it rearrange my internal furniture. The cost, of course, is social. You cannot easily discuss a novel you are rereading for the fourth time when everyone else is busy ranking the ten best books of the year. But that conversation has never tempted me much. It is too vertical, too evaluative, too eager to conclude.

My reading life is horizontal. One book leads sideways to another: an allusion, a shared anxiety, a common cadence of despair or delight. A Russian novel opens onto a French diary; a philosophical aside sends me back to a poem I read at seventeen and misunderstood entirely. Time collapses. Influence becomes conversation. The dead are not dead at all; they are merely quieter than the living, and infinitely more patient.

This is what it means, I think, to exist outside time—not to reject it, but to refuse its pressure. The present is loud. It shouts its claims. It demands attention in the name of urgency. But literature, real literature, does not shout. It murmurs. It waits for the reader who is willing to slow down enough to hear it.

So no one recommends books to me, and I do not miss it. I live among my own recommendations, accumulated over a lifetime, stacked not on shelves but in memory, each one marked by the moment it entered my life and the person I was when it did. I am a hermit, yes—but not a lonely one. My solitude is crowded.