Last night while reading Claire Messud’s new novel 'This Strange Eventful History', I had an odd sense of déjà vu, a sense that I’d been there before. A moment later I remembered seeing the passage in the review that led me to read the book, and I realized that I had been there before, but this second visit was much richer than the first because I knew how I had gotten there. Such is the pleasure of reading – being engrossed in a book is like living in a different world.