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.