The intensity of reading a great story is a little bit, I think, like sitting with your back to an open stove in a cold kitchen, feeling its heat grow hotter against you as you sit still. It's something almost physical, an act of intimacy between you and the writer's words. Dubus reminds me of why I can't bear to be in a room where thirty other people are reclining on folding chairs, listening to a writer read out loud from his work. When reading becomes a communal activity, it's too tempting to treat prose as spectacle, to set people up for punchlines or to feel a need to deliver the kind of redemptive moment we've become so used to from watching TV and the movies.