All reading is rereading. Consider: It is said that in order to learn a new word, children must hear it repeated on average 72 times. Their first books are splendidly versatile objects, part toy, part teething tool, part picture gallery, part—largely—containers of magical shapes that compel an adult to speak the same sounds over and over, making a rhyme or a story reappear out of (it seems) ether. No one who has spent even a few hours in close company with children can fail to observe the way young expanding minds thirst for repetition in play, in domestic rituals and in reading alike. “More!” comes the command, “Again!”; and the same board book is flipped back to the same gnawed cover so that its skeletal narrative can be told, and heard, anew.

Bound in this tightly whorled bud of a beginning reader is a taste—more than that, a need—for circularity that seems fundamental to the act of reading. One more commonly thinks of reading as a linear experience: From title page to final period, the eye and the hand tug the brain forward. Yet the brain does not always comply. It wanders. It skips ahead. It loops back and makes connections to earlier events in the story. It remembers and makes connections to other stories and books entirely. And once the book is completed, the circularity continues: Sometimes (or in some future time) it consists of actual rereading; often it means mentally sifting through what has been read; occasionally, with beloved books especially, an association forms to the circumstances in which the book first came into the reader's hands so that moments of reading become joined with moments of experience. This circle of reading, which begins in childhood, is enlarged and enriched all through one's reading life; it constantly spirals overhead, or in one's head, like a persistent wind.

If the reader also happens to be a writer, he may be moved to throw a net up into that circulating wind and report on what has been captured in it. In the most general terms, this is the shared impulse behind Letters to My Son on the Love of Books by Roberto Cotroneo, The Books in My Life by Colin Wilson and A Dangerous Profession by Frederick Busch, three authors of different origin (Italy, England and America, respectively), background and talent who, passionate lifelong readers all, come together in the common belief that, as Cotroneo observes, literature “isn't simply a game of the intellect, but a way of understanding the world.” …

Although novelist Busch has subtitled A Dangerous Profession A Book about the Writing Life, it is effectively a book about reading even when the reading taking place is of people and not actual texts. “My Father's War,” one of the more moving and personal pieces in this collection of essays, is a portrait of the author's father, Benjamin J. Busch, whom his son approaches through the one written document his father created, a frustratingly inexpressive diary he kept during World War II. Seasoned reader that he is and (one feels) equally seasoned son, Busch is acutely attentive to his father's omissions. Like a painter making expert use of negative space, the senior Busch for a long time doesn't mention death or fear in his diary—which are “all I can imagine myself imagining,” his son comments—and when he is wounded by a booby trap, he conveys the event in an unadorned 13 words. Only on furlough at home does the soldier refer to “the end of the dread of death.” “He was several people. He was secret from himself,” Busch explains; and later: “I think that he is an aspect of every charming, elusive, sturdy, and vanishing man I have written.” All this is lovely in a self-referential and piercing sort of way, but Busch presses on, turning the personal into a wider commentary on the nature of writing: “You would think I'd have gotten him right by now, achieved some kind of satisfying resolution. But … there is no satisfaction, because writing does not offer that emotion.”

Busch further “reads” his past by presenting a sketch of his friend Terrence des Pres, which, for all its elegiac affection for the dead writer and genuine appreciation of Des Pres' intellect, is a much cagier piece of work. A circumlocution like “After the 1979 publication of my novel Rounds, in which Terrence claimed to find himself represented as less than heroic, we stopped knowing each other” interestingly omits (as does Benjamin Busch's war diary) Busch's participation in the action at hand, which in this case appears to be the writing of a novel that imperiled their friendship. “The Floating Christmas Tree” is Busch's rendition of a classic writer's fairy tale: his down-and-out and oft-rejected period, in Greenwich Village during the early 1960s, when he worked at a market research firm during the day and at night wrote in the bathroom of his studio apartment. The story is a fairy tale because the very fact that the reader is able to cup it in his palms tells him that the writer thrives (or at least survives) in the end, but it is one of those essential stories that speaks to all people embarked on creative journeys; when well done, as here, it is a story that can't be told too often.

As a reader of writers (Herman Melville, Graham Greene, John O'Hara), Busch can be astute and big-hearted. He writes incisively about how Charles Dickens, in David Copperfield, “does what all novelists do: He resists time by rowing backward, against the current, into his own life.” The current, in Dickens' case, was mighty and guilt-inducing, because one of the issues at stake was Copperfield's marriage to Dora, whose “unsuitability of mind and purpose” mirrored Dickens' to Kate Hogarth. The reader responds even more warmly to Busch's generosity toward overlooked or unfairly interpreted writers. In “Even the Smallest Position,” Busch at length describes why he so deeply values “The Steinway Quintet,” a long short story by Leslie Epstein, a friend of his. No matter. Busch's painstaking panegyric to the story's “music and the song of language, in the air or on the page” is sufficiently well-substantiated to add the scarce title to any questing reader's wish list, which is one of the delightful byproducts of these kinds of essays: their capacity to open up one's own personal reading circle.

A different—a corrective—value emerges in Busch's piece on Ernest Hemingway, a writer whose readership, he feels, has been unfairly reduced by the modern cult of biography. Though Busch does not dismiss the more problematic habits of Hemingway's mind (the bigotry, the anti-Semitism, the misogyny, the violence), he maintains that filing writers away “in categories that trundle home like mortuary drawers” is a lazy and superficial substitute for coming to terms with their writing, which in Hemingway's case can work “awfully effectively on the soul of an attentive reader who is not rigidly, ideologically, insensible to it.”

Near the end of his probing, gently meditative volume, Cotroneo explains to his son why “I and so many others write books like this one, instead of occupying ourselves with the concrete, the serious and the real.” He might easily be speaking for Busch and Wilson, for inhabitants of reading circles everywhere, when he proceeds to tell Francesco that “books contain instructions about how to live life by means of a fictitious world, a world made of paper.” Such instructions are not always seen or grasped with ease or finality, which may be why the pursuit of them keeps these readers—all committed readers—reading and rereading, always.