Handed the Book at Twelve

Start with a boy of twelve in an Irish provincial town, handed a book by his older sister. He never got over it. John Banville, Booker Prize winner and one of Ireland's living masters, opens this series on James Joyce's Dubliners by telling that story himself, and by making a larger case: that reading is the strangest thing we do, and the most necessary. There is a rant about phones, an alien watching the Earth, and a chambermaid who, by Banville's lights, rescued Joyce from himself. And it ends with a claim about the young man who wrote these stories that sounds unlikely until you check the dates.