The intensity of reading made its own place; I entered the pages and became oblivious to my real surroundings. How many times did I read the books? It seems improbable that the almost clairvoyant precision with which I recall Boylston's dialogue and descriptions was the result of only one or two readings, but it may well have been. The time-altering passage a child makes into the landscape of certain books may inscribe them permanently in a single journey.
When I reread them, the smallish library books still fittes neatly into my hands, as if I were shrugging into an old jacket that preserved the memory of my elbows and shoulders. I knew those thick pages with their deep bottom margins and dash-filled dialogue, even their smell […]

So memory has been corrected. But there is more than a tinge of melancholy in such emendation. Neither the book nor its youthful reader can ever exist for each other in quite the same way. The Leather Pushers is dated, long-winded, not without its dull patches. The same might be said of its middle-aged reader. But something else can be said as well. For just a few minutes while paging through the novel, I sensed through the haze of years and the intellectual veil lowered by critics and well-intentioned professors what it was like to read as if there were no tomorrow. The pure joy may never be regained but if we're lucky, we can chance across one of those "good bad books" we read thirty or forty years ago and recall what it's like to be a child who reads.