It’s possible that books are like relationships. Some people may be quite happy hopping from one book to the next, looking for easy reads in the same way you might troll the bars for easy lays. There are thousands of completely forgettable books that will amuse you for an evening or two; they seduce you with their market-tested cover art, their comfortable length (not to overwhelm commitment-phobes), even the unabashedly lewd pick-up lines that open their narratives, the lines referred to in writing workshops as “hooks”: The summer my dog died, I learned how to stop time.