There may not be a wrong way to read a book, but if you will indulge me, I will offer advice on how to read the books of Gene Wolfe. It helps to have a key, or it can. The first book of his I learnt to read was the novel Peace. The first time I read it, in my late teens, I read a gentle memoir of Midwestern life. The second time, in my early twenties, I discovered that if, as you read it, you realize that its narrator has been dead for many years, and you look for deaths in the text, particularly deaths he might have been in some way involved in, the shape of the novel changes. It becomes darker and more precise. I had learnt that, in reading Wolfe, every word matters.
