And this, of course, is why you should never read for yourself. You can't give yourself the impersonal reading you need. [...] to succeed, it requires an ability to be coldly impersonal about yourself and your state, so as not to cloud what is there with what you want to see. I think few of us know enough about our lives to know our place in them---we can't see ourselves as we might a character in a novel, with the same level of detachment and appraisal. [...]