“A writer,” Saul Bellow once observed, “is a reader moved to emulation.” But what if it’s also the other way around? What if, when we think about writing, we are actually teaching ourselves how to read? For me, the act of setting words to paper always exists in conjunction with the question of what I have been reading—and why. Books, after all, require readers to bring them to life.

I kept thinking about this reciprocal relationship as I read Into the Weeds, Lydia Davis’s new book, adapted from a 2024 lecture and published as part of the Yale University Press series Why I Write. I tend to be allergic to these sorts of books, but I’ve long admired the restless intelligence of Davis’s short fiction and essays, as well as the fact that, if Into the Weeds is any indication, she appears to fee

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