[Editor’s Note: We interrupt the deluge of pie recipes in order to bring you more insightful observations from Jim Jewell. We will return to our regularly scheduled pie programming shortly.]

I harbored suspicions about Fool on the Hill by local Matt Ruff for many months. It was one of many impulse purchases made in the wake of a good friend giving me $500 in Amazon credit shortly after his father died. I don’t even remember why the book initially appealed to me, but after it arrived I would occasionally flip through the first few pages and toss it aside, uninspired.

When I finally cracked it with some resolve, the first twenty-plus pages were read to an internal mantra, “I’m going to hate this. I’m going to hate this.”

And then? “Awwww.” It plucked some taut string inside me whose existence I would have denied, and the resonant thrum never died out. I love that book, so much so I considered a two-week bender upon completion to destroy enough brain cells that I could read it again, fresh. I was slain by its magic, by its tribes, by its valiant fairies and dogs.

It was an epiphany that brought other experiences with literature into focus. There have been authors I’ve sought out, made a conscious decision to read deeply. Anthony Burgess, Kurt Vonnegut and Aldous Huxley fell in quick succession. There were genre quests, when I filled up with Gothic novels, historical novels, and the high-brow fringes of science fiction. I filled in perceived gaps in my education by seeking out feminist lit and African-American lit.

And then there have been the surprises. Some have been of the solitary nature, like Fool on the Hill, a more common experience when I was still in school and reading more imposed titles. The Good Earth is one of my top five favorite novels of all time, a revelation that may never have occurred had it not been assigned in a junior high social studies class. Sometimes authors sneak slyly in, as when I recently realized how much TC Boyle I’ve read and how deeply engaged I’ve been by every bit of it, so much so that he now supplants some of my purposeful conquests in my personal pantheon.

These experiences expose two of the roles fit or powers exerted by literature: literature’s service to our conscious attempts to explore and define self, and its ability to force changes in perception, to allow us to step outside our constructions and look at ourselves in an unexpected way. I am, to an extent, what I decide to read, and also what those things I read show me to be.

These two aspects have been in play during my most recent read, The Baby Lottery by Kathryn Trueblood (the review of which will appear here once I finish wrangling it). I pointedly sought this book out, complete with a fist full of expectations, only to be utterly confounded in my response.

It has served as a reminder I would never have thought I needed, though apparently I do, of why I am a reader, and why it is terrifying and exhilarating to be a writer.