I’m always curious about people who love a book I hate, and vice versa. What do they see that I didn’t? Why did something speak to them when it didn’t even whisper to me? I think this quote, from Angela Carter, prolific English novelist and journalist, might explain some of it:

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

That is so true – you really do bring all of your history, other things you’ve read on the subject, the things that have happened to you and the people you know to each book you read.