But it's no less a pleasure - and as our experience of reading deepens, it should be a still greater pleasure - to meet characters who are not mirror images of us at all, whose feelings we might not immediately sympathise with or even recognise, whose views of the world confront ours and perhaps, if it's a truly challenging book we're reading, laugh everything we believe to scorn.
On Monday, just after Mr. Kirchner passed the sash and presidential cane to his wife, thousands of square white pieces of paper fell from the rafters of the Congress reading "to deepen the change," referring to the next phase of their joint effort.
"Sophie Collins and Emily Berry have both been influenced by Anne Carson's work and have taken it in creative and fascinating ways, so the hope is that people will come to the collection who might not know Sophie and Emily but who like Anne Carson, and whose experience of reading Anne Carson might be deepened by reading her in the context of these younger poets".
The act of forming, breaking, and reforming the chemical bond, he said, deepened the reading experience.
She graduated in 1981 from Spring Valley High School, earned a B.A. in 1985 at Sarah Lawrence College, where her interest in reading and writing poetry deepened, and in 1987 went to the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Our interest in this issue deepened when we read the results of a 2010 report, shared with us by the Three Strikes Project at Stanford Law School.
Her conviction that Page 3 was a problem deepened when she read Clare Short's account of campaigning on the issue in the 1980s.
In his view, the S.E.C. staff was worried about the effect the case would have on Wall Street executives, a fear that deepened when he read an e-mail from Reid Muoio, the head of the S.E.C.'s team looking into complex mortgage securities.
Such, I suspect, was the case with "Ulysses," a book I read at eighteen, without having first read "The Odyssey," which might have deepened my appreciation of Joyce.
In many ways, reading and discussing her book has deepened our friendship.
