In the 1960s my uncle kept a large library, housed in a room he called "his library," facts that seemed both marvelous and exotic to me as a boy. When I visited him in the summers, he would encourage me to browse his shelves and to read whatever I liked. He gave little guidance and forbade nothing, not even the "Kama Sutra" or "In Cold Blood," though both so confused and terrified me I finished neither.