" He tells Heath that reading was never modeled for him, that he couldn’t remember either of his parents ever reading a book, except aloud, and to him. “Without missing a beat Heath replied: ‘Yes, but there’s a second kind of reader. There’s the social isolate—the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him.… What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But in that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you—because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren’t present, they become your community” (77). Franzen sees himself as this second kind of reader, especially when Heath tells him that readers of the social-isolate variety are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled habit variety. "

― James C. Collins ,