If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino (1979)

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, _If on a winter's night a traveler_. That is not a summary of the plot; it is the book's own first sentence, and you are already inside it. You settle in, you find your place, and forty pages later the book betrays you: a binding error, the chapter snaps off, the story you had surrendered to is gone. So begins the chase. Ten times you fall into a gripping opening, ten times it is snatched away just as you lean in, and the genius is that Calvino has made your own hunger for the next page the actual plot. You stop reading about desire and start feeling it. Threaded through the hunt is a courtship, tender and funny, with Ludmilla, another reader you keep meeting in bookshops, because to love reading turns out to be very close to loving a person. The only honest ending such a book could have is the one it gives you: a reader in bed, about to begin again.