“A writer,” Saul Bellow once observed, “is a reader moved to emulation.” But what if it’s also the other way around? What if, when we think about writing, we are actually teaching ourselves how to read? For me, the act of setting words to paper always exists in conjunction with the question of what I have been reading—and why. Books, after all, require readers to bring them to life.I kept thinking about this reciprocal relationship as I read Into the Weeds, Lydia Davis’s new book, adapted from a 2024 lecture and published as part of the Yale University Press series Why I Write. I tend to be allergic to these sorts of books, but I’ve long admired the restless intelligence of Davis’s short fiction and essays, as well as the fact that, if Into the Weeds is any indication, she appears to feel the same. On the first page, she recounts that, when she was invited to discuss her writing, “I found that I was thinking about reading—reading the writing of someone else.” What Davis has produced, then, is not really a book about making books—indeed, she eschews such discussions for the most part—but rather one that encourages us to reimagine reading and writing as a continuous back-and-forth.Such conversations are not exclusive to writers; they involve all who read. That’s the implicit faith at the center of Davis’s investigation, and it offers a host of possibilities—not as a writing manual, but as a reading guide. This feels vital at a time when it has become more difficult to discover books through thoughtful criticism. We live in a culture where books coverage has been rendered expendable, an easy cut on the corporate balance sheet. (The Associated Press’s decision to kill book reviews is only the most recent example.) Many of the outlets that still publish criticism have shrunk coverage or shifted toward fuzzier features that approach literature as little more than a lifestyle choice. Algorithms mine our data in order to feed us suggestions “inspired by your shopping history.”And yet, for me, the whole point of reading is to discover what we don’t know we want (or need) to know. “If you are given a book as a present,” Davis notes, “or someone has recommended it, then you have that impetus to read it as well as companionship, if your friend has already read it. That support may sustain you when you falter.” She is writing here about a Christmas gift she received: George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop, a look back at the lost art of wagon building, originally published in 1923.[Read: The hardest question for a writer to answer]With Into the Weeds, Davis operates as just such a recommender, reporting from the slipstream of her reading life. As I read, I found myself making notes, ordering titles, and thinking about all the ways we come to books. Take The Wheelwright’s Shop. “It was not,” Davis confides, “an obvious choice of a book to give to someone like me who was not particularly interested in woodworking and was not thinking of building a wagon.” At the same time, she reckons, the book represents an act of generosity—not only the gift giver’s but also the author’s. Sturt reveals much “that was simply new to me,” Davis writes, “as, for instance, that a blacksmith did not wish to admit sunlight into his shop because the bright light made it difficult to perceive and measure the precise intensity of his fire.”The arcane quality of this information is what makes it resonate with Davis, because it reflects the pleasure of encountering the unexpected. Here, that involves not just the intricacies of blacksmithing and carpentry, but also the connection she feels with a friend. The further she reads, the more the bond strengthens; let’s call it a seductive intimacy. Not only that, but writing about it, sharing it with us, also transfers onto Davis the role of gift giver. In just over 130 pages—Into the Weeds is a full book but not a thick one—she moves from John Ashbery to Anselm Hollo, Raymond Carver to Christina Sharpe. A riff on Karl Ove Knausgaard (the author of an earlier Why I Write installment) leads to a disquisition on the Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel, Hunger, and then to an assessment of Hamsun’s final book, On Overgrown Paths, composed not long after the Second World War, when the author, a notorious Nazi supporter, “was confined to an old people’s home while awaiting his trial for sedition.”This is also how I read, and I like to imagine that something similar is the case for all readers at various points in their life. We slip from one book to the next and then another not via an orchestrated course of study but rather through a set of loosely linked meanders—a series of improvisations. Sometimes, this manifests itself in the outer world; Davis recalls that she, too, walked “on the very same overgrown path that Hamsun had really walked on.” The admission left me with a shock of recognition, because I, too, have experienced this interplay of literature and memory. Reading Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley in Rome, I shivered with delight as the character retraced my footsteps (or I his) “down the hill to the Via Veneto, past the American Library, over to the Piazza Venezia, past the balcony on which Mussolini used to stand to make his speeches, past the gargantuan Victor Emmanuel Monument and through the Forum, past the Colosseum.”Reading in place, I like to call this. It makes me feel as if I have stepped inside the book. The effect is of a double weave of associations, a harmonic convergence. This is where Into the Weeds delivers us as well. One of my favorite moments comes when Davis turns to “The Cows”—which she published in 2011 as a small stand-alone book, and which blurs the lines among story, essay, and diary. “I did not write it,” she explains, “with any intention. I did not even write it all at once—it took three years to accumulate. The way it originated was as simple as looking out the window, or standing by the road looking across the road.”[Read: Eight books for dabblers]The serendipity she’s describing offers an almost perfect metaphor, not only for the act of writing but also for that of reading, which feels to me ever more driven by such subtle whims. I think of the way Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead led me to Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, and then to Paul Auster’s Leviathan. Or Lauren Elkin’s No. 91/92, which introduced me to Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris and Virginia Woolf’s bracing and unexpectedly timely essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.”When I was a kid—reading wildly, indiscriminately—I thought of literature as an unmapped territory, which meant that reading was a form of active exploration, in which we consciously engage, making forays and taking risks. What were the parameters of this landscape, its borders and flora and fauna? What was the terrain? I still regard reading through such a filter, but now the ecosystem has been altered—scarred by the isolating subdivisions of social media, flooded with distracting videos and clickbait. In this environment, we come to books more and more via platforms: celebrity book clubs, TikTok, Amazon. And yet, Davis reminds us, literature remains as open as it has ever been. Into the Weeds offers less a new way to think than perhaps an old one, pushing back against mechanization and the collapse of context by reframing reading in the most particular and human terms.