Reading, in midlife, changes character. The books you loved at twenty-five are not necessarily the books you can bear at fifty-five. The novels you read for plot give way to novels you read for something harder to name: for the quality of attention they bring to experience, for the accuracy of their emotional observation.
This is a gift. The woman who has been reading seriously for thirty years carries a kind of internal library that shapes not only her taste but her perception. She sees the world with slightly more definition.
The books that change us are rarely the ones we expected. They arrive at the right moment and make an argument that our life has prepared us, exactly, to receive.
At Belle Vie, we will read widely and without apology. We will read the novels that illuminate what it is to be a woman in this particular century. We will read history and biography and the essay in its highest form. We will read with the conviction that the examined life is still the only life worth having.
Questions Women Ask
How do I read more books in a year?
Keep one book within reach of the chair you already sit in, read twenty pages before sleep, and stop reading anything that has not earned the third night. Most people's reading fails on abandonment, not on speed.
Is it all right to quit a book I am not enjoying?
Yes — and doing it earlier is what makes room for the books that matter. Duty reading is the surest way to stop reading altogether.
How do I choose what to read next?
Follow the question you are actually living with, not a list. Then alternate: one novel, one life, one book that is simply a pleasure. See on biography and what the novel can do.