Today’s newsletter was inspired by the response of Cressida Cowell, author of How To Train Your Dragon, to the NYTimes Book Review’s question, “You’re organizing a dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?”

Shakespeare, George Eliot and Homer, if such a person ever existed (it’s a bit contentious, that one). You have to invite the dead ones. Although one of the many wonderful things about reading is that this is what you are already doing. You are having a dinner party with people who died, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of years ago, and whose voices and feelings and intelligence and opinions are all captured in the extraordinarily brilliant and irreplaceable technology that is a book. Now that really is magic.

Auden called this “breaking bread with the dead.”