Think about your favorite book. Now ask yourself: Would you admit this to others? Most would share—but literature professors are not most people.

Matthew Rubery
Matthew Rubery is a professor of modern literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Harvard University Press, 2016) and the coeditor of Further Reading (Oxford University Press, 2020), part of the series Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature.