When my father was in dental school, he took the subway every day from midtown Manhattan, where my mother and he lived in a tiny studio apartment, to Columbia’s medical school campus on 168th Street. It was a long ride, but rather than study, my father used the time to read. One summer, his book was War and Peace.

My father always described himself as a plodder, this in spite of the fact that he was among the top students in his dental school class. Certainly he was not a fast reader, or at least, not fast enough for the classmate who sometimes commuted with him and once famously asked, “Schultz, are you still reading that book?”

I can imagine how my father felt. Last summer, I was reading A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. Whenever the book and I appeared together in public—the dentist’s waiting room, for instance, or a crowded plane—someone would inevitably comment on the heft of the book and ask how long I’d been reading it. My answer numbered in weeks.

A Suitable Boy is a very long book. Just for the record, the Harper Perennial paperback is 1474 pages of small type and narrow margins. The book is so fat that there’s room for “International” to be printed horizontally on the spine, right above “Bestseller.”

In a nutshell, Seth’s novel is about finding a husband (the “suitable boy” of the title) for a young, upper-middle-class Indian woman. But it’s also about India in the first years after Partition. And about family. And religion. And class. And love and death and politics and poverty and tradition and children and heat and music and friendship and change and dust and food and poetry. And family. Did I mention family?

In short, it’s about the whole sweeping panorama of life, and I couldn’t put it down. But when people asked, “What’s it about?” I was at a loss for words. “Boy meets girl,” seemed inadequate. Ditto, “Life.” Invariably, I ended up saying that it was kind of a War and Peace for India, while knowing the formulation didn’t do justice to either book.

Like my father, I was in my twenties when I slogged through Tolstoy’s masterpiece. I seem to remember whole chapters devoted to military theory, and Levin expounding on love. I also saw the Russian movie, which clocks in at 390 minutes. At the end of the six-and-a-half hours, a friend scored it at War: 87, Peace: 12. The movie was in Russian with English subtitles. Reading it didn’t take as long as reading the book, though some of the battle scenes felt like it.

War and Peace is considered one of the greatest novels ever written. Philosophy meets fiction. A Suitable Boy is a novel of manners. While it may have taken both authors about the same number of pages to get from the first word to The End, the getting there is a lot more fun in Seth’s book. Reading it would probably have made getting to dental school more fun, too.

I met Anne Lamott a number of years ago the way one generally meets an author—on the printed page. “Read Bird by Bird,” friends said. “You’ll like it.” They were right. And when I get bogged down with my own writing, I remember Lamott’s advice about giving myself short assignments—approaching the project scene by scene. It helps.

Sometime later, I renewed the acquaintance. Reading Plan B did feel like a reunion, for if there’s one thing that characterizes Lamott’s essays, it’s her voice—the inimitable brio with which she bares her burdened heart, turning lived life into art.

The opening essay of Plan B begins with her realization that things look hopeless. It’s the Bush II administration and the Iraq War. From this platform, she starts playing around with deserts—physical and spiritual—then picks up a call from a friend offering patient wisdom. Lamott juggles the administration, the desert and the advice to see what will happen, puts prayer in motion and then, having sent God to the rafters (“the problem with God…is that He or She rarely answers right away”), launches an anecdote about winning a ham. Snagging God on the way down (“Maybe it was the ham of God”), she spins around to her serendipitous gift of the ham to a hungry friend who cries in gratitude. One by one the pieces fall in place until she’s back in the desert, which rain showers bring to life, “and it seems, but only seems, that you went from parched to overflow in the blink of an eye.”

Cue the applause. The writing is irresistible. In “Cruise Ship,” she refers to her middle-aged body’s jiggling pounds as “the aunties,” takes them on vacation with her and indulges their preference for crème brulé because “they get out so rarely.” A few paragraphs later, she’s likening teen-aged synchronized swimmers to “Breck girls opening and closing like anemones in time-lapse photography, kaleidoscopically.” It takes my breath away.

Though I write about her as Lamott, I think of her as Annie. Her voice invites it. Indeed, reading her is like having a one-way conversation with a very dear friend. Which is why I was surprised when I bought Grace (Eventually), and couldn’t read a word until I’d put a sticker over the author photo on the flap. (It’s a nice photo, by the way. Annie would want to be reassured.)

I have no objection to author photos. In fact, when people talk to me about publishing on the Internet, I tell them that if/when my novel goes public, I want pages, covers, and my photo on the back. The photo is for my benefit, confirming that I’ve become an author.

As is Anne Lamott. She’s also her own main character. The conflation caused my unease. For while Lamott’s photo shows Annie’s controversial dreadlocks, as well as two eyes, a nose and a mouth, the person I see is different from the one whom hours of reading have put before my mind’s eye. Yet this is how art always works, isn’t it: artificer, artifact, audience. Three balls in motion.

The time may come when I tear the sticker off the photo and let Lamott be Lamott. As for Annie, she’ll always live for me on the printed page, fully embodied in her virtuosic voice.

I read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead in a season of loss. My mother had recently died of a cancer that was breathtaking in its speed and ferocity. My father, her husband of sixty-four years, was found to be significantly more debilitated by dementia than my siblings or I had realized. And with the question of his care looming, the long-patched-over fissures that ran among my sisters, my brother and me—our parents’ famously close children—split wide open.

It was a time of grief, anger and uncertainty, and into it came the voice of Reverend John Ames, the epistolary narrator of Gilead. Ames is seventy-six, dying, and knows it. Over the course of what would have been several months in 1956, he writes a letter to his young son, expecting that the boy will read it when he is grown. This extended letter becomes the novel.

To an outsider, the boy would seem an ordinary child of seven, full of questions, misconceptions and quirks. But to Ames, he is the beloved. With humility, honesty and gentle humor, he writes to his boy about God and heaven, parents, children, Soapy the cat, his own father and grandfather, bath time, beauty, heartbreak and love. It is a quiet novel, informed by Ames’s compassionate and forgiving voice. As his death neared, I began to weep. I didn’t think I could bear another loss.

Years before when my father retired, my mother and he had moved to a house in rural Vermont that overlooked a pond. Over time, it became a custom for me to walk around it with my mother whenever I visited, descending through a steep meadow, crossing the wooden footbridge, commenting on the blackberries, the wildflowers, family. Our last walk together was two weeks before she died.

Our progress was slow that day as her body was already ravaged by cancer. She carried a walking stick, but down and back refused my proffered arm. She was not given to sentimentality or effusion, and for years I had been saying the main thing—that I loved her. So we talked that day as we always did—of the condition of the footbridge, the ripeness of the blackberries, the comings and goings of the family—knowing what we were avoiding, knowing there was nothing else to say. When we got back to the house, she lay down to rest and never got up again. We were very different, my mother and I, but we had done our best.

For Gilead’s Reverend John Ames, the big words come easily. “You have been God’s grace to me,” he writes to his boy, “a miracle, something more than a miracle.” His is a torrent of unambiguous parental love, the kind we can only know as innocents, before the rough passage through adolescence to young adulthood and beyond. Before the bad choice, the missed chance. Before father and son, mother and daughter, we say the things we say. Before we disappoint each other.

Last spring, I read Paradise Lost. Though I’d studied two of the poem’s twelve books in college, I’d never read the epic in its entirety from Milton’s assertion that he writes to “justify the ways of God to man” all the way through to Adam and Eve, hand in hand, making their “solitary way” from Eden. For someone who thinks of herself as well read, it was time.

To help ensure that I’d get to that final scene, I bought an attractive edition with a stylized snake on the cover, and gave myself an important dispensation. Unless hopelessly confused, I would ignore the copious footnotes explicating allusions, historical context, rhetorical archaisms and the ins-and-outs of Reformation theology. I wanted Milton’s words to propel me.

Typically, I read poetry at night, in bed. That’s when I’m most likely to muster the unlikely combination of serious focus and openness to experience that makes me receptive to its rhythms, language and infolded imagery. My husband’s preferred bedtime reading is detective fiction, but snuggled next to me, he graciously tolerates the interruptions when I feel compelled to share choice lines or striking images.

What I didn’t expect when starting Paradise Lost was how often I’d be interrupting him, even while trying to limit myself to something like “the best of the best.” The lines were simply too good to keep to myself. In Milton’s poem, the serpent’s coils are “mazy folds;” Satan is likened to “a black mist low-creeping,” and Eve in the garden of Eden stands “veiled in a cloud of fragrance” while “the roses bushing round about her glowed.” Frequently I’d find myself grinning at the sheer exuberance of Milton’s language, the fecundity of his imagination.

Paradise Lost was published in 1667, only fifty-six years after the King James translation of the Bible. In the first printing of the King James Bible, only three-and-a-half pages were needed to get the reader from “In the beginning…” to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden. The serpent dispenses with Eve and the apple in a few lines.

Milton’s account, on the other hand, is vast—an enterprise of over 10,500 lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter. My annotated edition runs to more than 400 pages. While Satan shows up early in Book I, Milton doesn’t get his reader to the fateful scene in the garden until Book IX, three-quarters of the way through. By then, Milton and I had been through the angels’ rebellion, the topography of Hell, Jesus’ promissory offer to save mankind, a retelling of the creation, the splendors of Eden, Adam and Eve making love (who knew!), and Satan’s desire for revenge, among other things. And though my footnote dispensation meant I didn’t get all the fine points, the telling was so vivid that when I finally reached Eve and the apple, I might as well have been reading one of my husband’s mysteries. My heart beat faster; my eyes raced down the page and I could hear a frantic inner voice protesting, “No, Eve, don’t do it!” (She did.)

Milton presents Eve’s act as an exercise of free will, though in his version of the story, God has the game rigged from the start. In allowing myself to ignore my edition’s scholarly footnotes I was making a similar though much less consequential choice. I was letting myself choose a particular way of reading in spite of the stern inner voice telling me what a serious reader would do. Had I made myself check every footnote, or even half of them, I wouldn’t have enjoyed myself nearly as much, or had the freedom to revel all those nights in the intimate and immediate experience of Milton’s poetry.

On our second date, my in-due-course-husband and I went to see SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE, which had just come out. That I chose it over a chamber music concert delighted my husband; that I felt comfortable enough with him to make the choice delighted me. As did the movie. It was deliciously campy.

In my favorite scene, Lois Lane is in freefall from the top of a skyscraper (her helicopter’s crashed) when Superman swoops down to save her. “I’ve got you, miss,” he says, scooping her into his arms. Caught mid-air, Lois Lane looks frantically around. “But who’s got you?”

Reasonable question. Is she really supposed to believe that this guy with the jutting jawbone flies? (And wears blue leotards? And rescues damsels in distress?) Yes to all. And anyone in the audience who doesn’t want to go along can ask for his/her money back.

I was reminded of the scene after a recent conversation about Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder. I had been delighted by the novel and recommended it to a friend, who recommended it to her mother. Her mother had nothing good to say about it. As in: fulminations and rants and, ultimately, a refusal to go on. The issue was credibility.

The novel’s main character, Marina Singh, is a physician-turned-pharmaceutical-researcher who, for a variety of reasons, leaves her lab in Minnesota and travels to an uncharted part of the Amazon basin in search of the doctor who was her mentor in medical school. The relationship didn’t end well. However, the mentor has neglected to call in. For months. The last person sent to find her didn’t return.

There are many reasons to like Marina: she’s a grown-up who’s made choices and accommodations in life, and knows it. She’s earnest and hard-working, and over the course of the novel she does her best to succeed at the nearly impossible task of finding someone in the Amazon who doesn’t want to be found—someone she doesn’t even like—and bring that person back alive. Or at least bring back a credible report of the person’s activities.

My friend’s mother apparently went along through the jungle-search phase of Marina’s adventure and even through Marina’s realization that her mentor is working to develop a human fertility drug. Nothing inherently unbelievable in that, or in the zeal to capitalize on the millions to be made from its production.

The credibility problem began with Marina’s realization that her mentor’s research is based on the discovery of an Amazonian tribe whose women bear children into their eighties and beyond. The women’s fertility stems from an addictive substance found in the bark of a particular tree. In a memorable episode, they converge on a grove of the trees and get gnawing.

Then it turns out that the mentor, in her seventies, herself, has done some chewing and gotten pregnant. (She’s a scientist; she claims to know what she’s doing.) But seventy and pregnant? Willingly? My friend’s eighty-year-old mother, who’d gotten her dander up at political incorrectness and balked at biological implausibility, put her foot down.

I’ve done it myself, but not this time. Safe in Patchett’s authorial hands, I let myself be carried from Minnesota to Brazil to that grove of trees with hormonal bark. I believed in the characters Patchett invented, the dilemmas they faced and the decisions they made. The pieces cohered: if A then B then C. Patchett had scooped me right out of my wingchair and into her imagined world.

As readers, we have to accept the writer’s premise, whether it’s a guy and a girl meeting on the fly or a woman traveling to the heart of darkness, since going along is key to fiction’s wild and wonderful ride. While we may tolerate some turbulence, the author can’t give us too many reasons to start wondering about Character A’s motives or the plausibility of Situation B because before you know it, we’ll be looking for the guy wires and wondering if they’ll hold. At that point, we might as well grab what’s left of the popcorn and exit up the center aisle.

Patchett’s title suggests that wondering might be an appropriate reaction to her novel. Did it happen? Could it? Does it matter? Like falling in love, reading fiction requires a leap of faith. End up in the right hands, and you’ll never willingly let go.

When I was in eighth grade, my mother challenged me to read The Portrait of a Lady. She had recently read it herself, and as was her habit, looked up every marginally unfamiliar word and copied the definition on an index card.

I had hardly begun when I decided I didn’t like it. The pacing was glacial, the dialogue enigmatic and the characters—with the possible exception of Isabel Archer—opaque. Also, the plot was a snooze. I complained about it vociferously. But a challenge is a challenge, and I made it to the end.

A week or so later, my mother cornered me with her index cards. She glanced at the top one and asked if I knew the meaning of “colloquy.” I tried, and got it wrong. “Portentous?” she asked. Wrong again. “Temerity?” When it became clear that I was zeroing out on her little quiz, she looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t see how you can claim you didn’t like The Portrait of a Lady. You have no idea what it’s about.”

She was right, of course, though for the wrong reason. I was simply too young. And the upshot of our little colloquy was not my determination to improve my vocabulary, but a vow never to read Portrait again.

In freshman English, however, I had to. I still thought the pacing glacial, the writing over the top, but the business of Madame Merle, Gilbert Osmond and Pansy was intriguing. On the other hand, it was the Sixties. Stranger stuff was happening right outside while the professor maundered on about American innocence and European corruption, the new world and the old.

Since then, I’ve returned to The Portrait of a Lady at least twice, the first time in my mid-twenties. It was a year of reading voraciously—piles of books I’d previously eschewed because they were about things like American innocence and European corruption. But a lot of growing happens in those heady days of early adulthood. Just ask Isabel Archer. I was swept away by the novel’s language, the romantic crosscurrents, the layers of trust and betrayal.

I read it again the week I was turning fifty. Though not exactly a matron (Jamesian vocabulary word), I did have a home, a family, a career and five decades of life behind me. With my landmark birthday looming, I sat on the porch and read as if impelled—heartsick yet awed by Isabel’s determination to hold onto one true thing in the face of all that ruin. This Portrait was painted on a grander scale than the one I’d read last. It was also more poignant.

My college-student’s Riverside edition, itself some thirty years old, resembled a loose leaf and nearing the end, I discovered that the last twenty pages were missing. It’s laughable, I know, but I dashed to the library, found the book in the stacks and stood there while I finished. I knew how Portrait ends, of course, but not how it would end this time. In the event, with humility and grace.

A while ago, I bought another copy, one with all the pages. It’s a handsome volume and I know that someday, feeling the need, I’ll take it from the shelf. Settling in a quiet place, I’ll open to tea on the lawn at Gardencourt, and ready myself to discover yet another wonderful novel in James’s perfect, polysyllabic words.