SOURCE: "Reading Eloquently," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. CI, No. 4, Fall, 1993, pp. 124-6.

[In the following favorable review of Reading and Writing, Fuller praises Davies's various insights into literary creation and appreciation.]

"Nobody ever reads the same book twice" to my ear is Robertson Davies's best line in a small book [Reading and Writing] containing many excellent ones. Midway in a lucid lecture on reading, he is making the point that all great, and many simply good, books not only must be read but reread, many times in the case of the finest, at different times or stages of life.

Unlike a river the book is not changing constantly but the reader is. If he has read The Brothers Karamazov in early youth, as I did, he must read it again from decade to decade, for what he can perceive and understand in it will have deepened and...