I asked Lotaria if she has already read some books of mine that I lent her. She said no, because here she doesn't have a computer at her disposal. She explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the list of all the words contained in the text, in order of frequency. " What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings? ...I head straight for the words richest in meaning; they can give me a fairly precise notion of the book." (186).