Re-reading Calvino at the start of a new year.

Why 'Invisible Cities' keeps coming back. Notes on a book I've read three times and still don't finish.

I pick it up, read forty or fifty pages, put it down for six months, pick it up again from the beginning. I've done this three times now. I'm not sure it's a book I'm meant to finish. It might be a book I'm meant to return to.

Each city Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan is a way of thinking about something else — memory, desire, the dead, the living. The structure is a disguise. The real subject is always just out of frame.

That's the kind of writing I find myself returning to: work that treats its form as a method of inquiry, not just a container for content.