‘...Each individual reader has been taught to read by Someone, and has read specific books (that were also read by many other people in his or her society), and has led a particular life **in a particular society.** So reading, even an individual reading a novel in the warmth of his or her own bed, is a community event...’ It may be for you, Jim, but not for me. When it comes to reading the only communities to which I belong are those created for me by the peculiar power of the writers whom I enjoy. Over the years - through the books & films & music of the time & through acquaintance with people who had lived there then - I eventually came to know quite a lot about the Paris of the 20s. But the Paris of The Sun also Rises was painted (in its ENTIRETY) for me by Ernest Hemingway - in the days when I knew nothing of all that other stuff (& which is virtually irrelevant to my enjoyment of The Sun.) Similarly, the whaling communities of New England, the Dublin of 1910 & the New York of the 1950s..... I suspect this enchanted effect was the one Ernest, Herman, Jim & Jerome intended to create in my - empty but eager - mind. To try to shut one’s eyes to the intentions of the writer seems to me an act of rather tired contrariness. On another issue. I didn’t write that an interest in religion was the mark of a third rate mind. (Though I sometimes wonder.) What I spoke of were ‘affectations of religiosity.’ Attention to the text is the first rule, Jim. Scottie B.