For as long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realise only by the initimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our own heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books.

In these essays, Proust explores all the pleasures we take from books as well as explaining the beauty of John Ruskin’s work and the joys of losing yourself in books at a younger age.