A guy was I was dating was in the class. He steadily undermined my reading skills because I always read things faster than him. He constantly nagged me, telling me I didn’t comprehend the material, that it was not possible to really read and understand Doestoevsky when I read him so quickly. I was a young female in the early seventies, vulnerable to male dominators. I believed that guy, distrusted my ability to absorb Crime and Punishment. Still, I got an A on the paper . . . and thirty five years after I graduated from college, I still remember quite a lot from that novel.

I sent my now-grown daughter to Waldorf schools. In Waldorf schools, instruction begins by telling the children stories, cultural myths that shape, well, culture. Fairies are told in first and second grade. Reading is not really taught in Waldorf schools. Children are prepared to read and trusted to begin reading when the time is right for them . . . and they all make the transition, boys reading later than girls, of course. Then, if the children are truly blessed and attend a Waldorf high school, the eleventh grade curriculum reads fairy tales again. Fairy tales are repeated because fairy tales are embedded with many important lessons for the unfolding human but a story met at age six brings different lessons than stories met at age sixteen. Fairy tales are repeated in the k-12 Waldorf curriculum to give the growing humans two opportunities to integrate the archetypal lessons in fairy tales. This also addresses the old writing-class saw that there are only a few stories, a few basic plots told over and over. Humans take away completely different lessons each time they hear a story, even if it is the exact same story every time.

I loved your piece, Ms. Schine, in the NYTimes on your reading history. My daughter is now 27. I basically ‘only’ exposed her to books that had been important to me when I was a kid. I never heard of The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, for example . . . so neither did she. I regularly come upon books that I did not offer my daughter and then I have to be careful to avoid remonstrating myself for having failed her. I did my best . . . plus my daughter was her own person. She could not get into Jane Austen!

Willa Cather. I lived in NE for a few years. My daughter was born there. I had already discovered Willa, though, before I lived in NE. In my earliest feminist fire, I aggressively sought out female literature, which is how I found Willa Cather. When I find a writer I like, I tend to inhale everything they have written. My Antonia has been one of my most beloved books since the seventies. And I pushed her on my daughter, because my daughter was born in Nebraska. . . but she never got into Willa Cather. Not yet.

I am in the process, Ms. Schine, of inhaling your books, having just finished The Three Weismanns of Westport. I am reading The Love Letter this evening.