My Life In Books Besides Middlemarch

Looking back on her reading life in her late teens, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead discusses the “flawed and pernicious division” between books read for pleasure and books read “because we have to,” because they’re part of the established literary canon.

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Alex Norcia is a writer living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in VICE, The Millions, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Electric Literature, Word Riot, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is an editor-at-large at The Offing.

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