The nature of my attachment to books and reading changes over time. Fiction, I mean. I read almost exclusively fiction, which I keep meaning to change since my knowledge of the world is painfully inadequate. I go through periods when there's nothing I'd rather do than read, these are my most misanthropic periods. You read a lot of paeans to literature, pompous self-congratulatory essays about the pleasures of reading, and they talk about how reading is "good for you", a life-affirming activity, because it somehow strengthens and deepens your fellowship with the human race, your sense of empathy and awareness of the singularity of individual lives unlike your own and so on, how tiresome, when really it's the perfect escape from the hell of other people and their excruciating dullness, their repetitive complaints, their unsolvable problems, their seeming inability to utter even one interesting sentence. When I feel more sociable and emotionally generous and desirous of connecting with people reading is no good, it's lonely and too quiet, I want flesh and blood. But of course in order to have that I probably would have needed to spend time cultivating relationships so they're there when I need them, which of course I haven't done since I was off someplace reading and not answering the telephone. So I end up reading alone on nights when I'd really rather be out doing something with people, and boy do I hate books right then. At that moment they represent everything that's wrong and all my failures and shameful character flaws.

So it tends to wax and wane, the reading thing. I think on balance, however, I prefer books to people.