That one battle had swung the pendulum. What the Saxons had won in a century of warfare against the Britons; what they had saved in a century and a half of warfare against the Danes; they now lost to the Normans in a single battle in one morning and afternoon, in which the cream of the Saxon nobility was destroyed. THE SHAPING OF ENGLAND, Isaac Asimov
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce was one of my favorite books of 2024, and I’ve been meaning to read its sequel for some time now. I thought Read of England as appropriate an occasion as any. Love Song is a mirror book to Unlikely Pilgrimage: just as Harold’s unplanned walk across England to visit Queenie on her deathbed was a way for him to sojourn with his past, so too do the series of postcards from him force Queenie to face her own. It’s a past that is shared in part, and separate in part — and sometimes both at the same time. It’s a story told across time, as we follow Queenie’s life inside the nursing home as she waits for death or Harold — whichever arrives first — and her ruminations on the past that Harold’s trip is inspiring. Because her story is set in a home filled with the aging and those approaching death, reflections on death, dying, and meaning are a strong part of this story. As it happens, it’s been so long since I read Unlikely Pilgrimage that I’d forgotten their story aside from Harold making the journey to see her, so I was largely experiencing this afresh. I don’t want to go into too much detail because of spoilers, but let’s say that beyond their close friendship as former coworkers, Harold and Queenie shared a connection he wasn’t fully aware of—one that led to tragedy, remorse, and Queenie’s long retreat. Until being diagnosed with an aggressive and terminal cancer, in fact, Queenie had been living in a sea-cottage. Instead of being a recluse, though, she’d found meaning in trying to create beauty amid desolation, and in her connections to the people in the village nearby. This thread of her life is beautiful in its own right — though of course, having read Unlikely Pilgrimage, I was waiting for Harold’s arrival with breath just as bated as hers and her fellow residents of the care facility. This proved to be as wise and sweet as the original, but it adds a lot to the original because we’re seeing Harold from outside himself, and his intense grief over the parts of the past — a grief that expresses itself in rage as well as sobs — surfaces here in a way that it didn’t, quite, in the original, but now Queenie’s pain and love are added to it for a sad, but lovely, story.
Quotations
So I said to the bindweed, You want to be in my garden and I don’t want you. I can’t dig you out. If I poison you, I run the risk of poisoning the plants I want to keep. We have a problem that will not go away. Something needs to change. Beside every bindweed stem, I pushed in a hazel stake. About twenty in all. The bindweed shot up these supports and rewarded me with lilac trumpets of flowers striped with white. I wouldn’t say I loved the bindweed. I certainly didn’t trust it. It would have scrambled all over my pinks the moment I stopped offering new stakes. But sometimes you have to respect the fact that even though you don’t want bindweed you have it, and you’d better get along side by side. It was the same with Napier.
We write ourselves certain parts and then keep playing them as if we have no choice. But a tardy person can become a punctual one, if she chooses. You don’t have to keep being the thing you have become. It is never too late.
Now that I’d stopped my work, I noticed that the doctor of philosophy was dressed in sensible walking gear and a red spotted bow tie. It was as if the walking clothes were saying one thing about him and the tie was shouting another. I liked that.
“Don’t try to see ahead to the nice bits. Don’t try to see ahead to the end. Stay with the present, even if it is not so good. And consider how far you’ve already come.”
“What do you do with a thousand followers?” He settled in the chair beside mine. “I had a wife and a best friend. That was all I needed.”
I accepted that sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.
Christos anesti! The choir I’m in will be attempting this piece later this morning. I knew Turner was a good musician & singer from his collabs with Allison Young, but I didn’t realize how vocally versatile he was.
You don’t talk to the people on the platform, or on the train. You sit in silence, lost in your headphones or your phone or even a book. But what happens when the man sitting opposite you suddenly begins choking to death? Amid his sudden gasps and heaves, the ice of convention is broken open; a woman in a bright suit bellows for a nurse, and suddenly a group of strangers become acquaintances….and then, part of one another’s lives. The People on Platform 5 is another “human connection” story, though with a different premise — and for me, a more labored execution. Whereas Authenticity Project had an ensemble cast with two stronger-than-average characters, Platform 5 is more dominated by one character so much that the other characters comment on it. She’s the hub; they’re the spokes, to quote them. An alternate title of this book calls it Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting, in fact. Iona is an aging dancer turned ‘agony aunt’, or ‘newspaper therapist’: she has a big personality, favors expressive clothing, and has no compunction against yelling or bossing people around. She’s especially fond of tone- and word-policing people, and insists on bringing her yappy little dog everywhere she goes — on the train, to the office, in restaurants and even the theater. Although her social aggression is part of what brings the group together, and sustains it — she’s the one who calls for a doctor to save the choker, the one who suggests that _______ talk to _______, etc — one reason I dragged my feet through this novel is that I found her borderline obnoxious and unlikable. (I have to add the latter because I’ve known several obnoxious people whom I still liked.) The most interesting character to me was Piers, who begins as an unlikable future trader: we later learn that he’s been fired from his job, is riding the commuter train to hide the fact from his wife, and is desperately day-trading to keep income coming in. He undergoes a lot of character growth and later facilitates another character’s growth. It was still a sweet story, but I think reading this back to back with Authenticity Project was a mistake: it did let me see a lot of commonalities in Poole’s writing, though, like frequent Harry Potter allusions. This is evidently set in the same universe as Authenticity, since the main character refers to one of her paintings as being a Julian Jessup: Julian was one of the two leads in AP. Without spoiling anything, Iona and Julian have another critical thing in common. All told, this is a short but sweet novel about people with different struggles — aging, bankruptcy, self-doubt, etc — finding support in one another.
In the afterwords of The Authenticity of Project, author Clare Pooley noted that it was her attempt to capture in fiction something she’s done in fact: change her life through honesty. She’d done it by blogging her journey to sobriety, beginning with the embarrassing account of her pouring some wine into a WORLD’S BEST MOM coffee cup just to combat a morning hangover to be there for her kids. The diary takes readers through an entire year of starter sobriety and details the psychological, physical, and social challenges she faced, as well as the changes she observed. Pooley’s journey to sobriety had the additional challenge of a cancer diagnosis several months in. I’ve never read anything like this before and found it fairly absorbing, although after a month or so it appears Pooley had more or less settled in on the right track. The biggest ongoing challenge was the expectation of social drinking, which she negated in part by drinking nonalcoholic ‘drinks’ like Beck’s Blue. There were only a couple of times that she was tempted by her old frenemy wine: one time her husband stumbled in on her contemplating a glass and intervened, another time she pulled her own self back. This is not a journey I’ve been on, personally, so I can’t comment on what her depiction of “Post-Acute Withdrawal Syndrome” is like: this entails mood swings and such as the brain continues to find a new normal after its chronic chemical sedation suddenly ceases. It was the beginning of this book that was most arresting, with Clare finally admitting that her bottle-of-wine a day habit was a problem, and she began dealing with the feelings of shame — both for having a problem and for potentially being a problem for her husband and kids — but forced herself to start moving in the right direction. I imagine whether the issue is sobriety or weight loss, getting started is always the hardest part. This appears to be very popular with readers, at least those who aren’t offended by the fact that Clare is upper middle class and not writing this memoir from a trailer park. On a partially irrelevant side note: I’ve read nearly two Pooley novels now, and was amused to see common elements in this and the novels, from words of wisdom to her frequent Harry Potter and David Attenborough references.
(Yes, this was supposed to be my next read, but I hit a stall during People on Platform 5 and looked at this instead, and then wound up reading it through. Should finish People on Platform 5 sometime today, though.)
Related: Rachel’s Holiday, Marian Keyes. An unreliable narrator is forced to go to rehab.
After a vigorous opening for the year, my reading fell back rather dramatically this month before starting to recover with some short biographies and novels at the close. (The novels were Britfic, too, a nice segue into Read of England.) Part of that was spending a lot of time with The Confessions and Order of the Phoenix, full-cast audio edition; the latter was nearly 27 hours of listening in the car and in bed. (I must say, drifting to sleep with Dolores Umbridge hissing at Harry is not advisable.) I made some progress in both the Classics Club and my America @ 250 reading, though I need to broaden my range outside of presidents. I’m looking for a proper history of Philly for my “cities’ track. The Science Survey has yet to get moving, but I am reading a title at present.
Read of England, of course, my annual focus on English literature and English history. I have three English lit options on my Classics Club list, and last year I acquired a sack of English history (along with some Southern history) for just a few dollars:
Nonbook Commonplace Quotes
We develop an unconscious set toward reading based on how we read during most of our digital-based hours. If most of those hours involve reading on the distraction-saturated Internet, where sequential thinking is less important and less used, we begin to read that way even when we turn off the screen and pick up a book or newspaper…There is a worrisome and potentially more lasting aspect to this “bleeding over” effect…:the more we read digitally, the more our underlying brain circuitry reflects the characteristics of that medium. “The Reading Rebellion“, School of the Unconformed
Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, “I have only one life to live.” Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things. “Me Generation”, Tom Wolfe as quoted on “The Me Generation’, Fifty Years On“. Rod Dreher.
At the root of our “metacrisis” is “the whole way in which we dispose our hearts and minds towards the world.” If you look at the world as a problem to be solved, as opposed to a mystery to be lived, you’re going to be miserable. There is no twelve-point formula for How To Live A Good Life, any more than there is a formula that, once you learn it, makes you a violinist. You have to learn by doing. “Teachings of the Monk of Skye“, Rod Dreher. Lex orandi, lex credendi….
“If moral reasoning is one casualty of reliance on LLMs, it is far from the only one. Consider writing. Writing is not simply a way to display what we know—it is the process through which we figure out what we think.” “When AI Thinks For Us“, Hyoungbin Park. Skeptic magazine.
Without getting ahead of my story, let’s just say that nearly every planet and moon that ever existed in the solar system was consumed by something bigger than itself, and that makes all the difference in the world. Most planets are now inside of a gas giant (Jupiter or Saturn), or inside the Sun; others are inside of Uranus and Neptune. Two or three additional Neptune-mass giants are believed to have existed that were consumed by the Sun or else ejected to roam the galaxy. Diversity is a matter of perspective, of what’s left: we don’t behold any ordinary planets. Almost every planet that ever existed was consumed by something greater; what’s left are the fortunate and the unusual survivors. WHEN THE EARTH HAD TWO MOONS
Given that I have class tomorrow night, it’s good odds my movie-watching for March is completed! My film viewing, like my book-reading, was extremely slow for the first part of the month and then exploded in the second half.
A Simple Favor. 2018. Anna Kendrick! An adorable and earnest single mom (Anna Kendrick) becomes friendsies with Blake Lively, a cynical and charismatic Lady of Business. Then Blake goes missing, and Anna K’s cooking & crafts vlog becomes an odd vector for people getting obsessed with the case and submitting tips. I didn’t know anything about the premise, so it was…er, more racy than expected. It reminded me a bit of Gone Girl – compelling and repellant at the same time – but it turns into a black comedy. The ending was….outrageous. Anna Kendrick continues to be a favorite.
“Secrets are like margarine: easy to spread, bad for the heart.”
Blake Lively: “You are so nice, I have no idea how you’ve lasted this long.” Drunk Anna Kendrick: “I’m not as nice as you think.”
“Let’s sit here and not talk. Let’s sit here and feel lousy and watch the grass grow.”
“CAN I SAY SOMETHING AS THE LADY WITH THE GUN?!”
11.22.63 Okay ,this is a miniseries, not a movie proper, but I watched the entire series through for the second time. I largely enjoyed the film work, acting, and execution, though I suspect some of my enjoyment comes from Sadie Dunhill; between her actor and her character she’s such a lovely character, and the “We did not ask for this room” bit at the end always moves me. I was slightly irritated to realize while watching this that I couldn’t remember the differences between the book and the TV series, aside from the Yellow Card Man who in the series appears to have been a time traveler who found himself trapped after fruitless attempts to change the past himself.
The Irishman, 2019. Why will I happily watch this 3.5 hour movie almost every year but have resisted starting an entire pile of 2-hour movies on account of their being “too long”.? The Irishman is the last in Scorcese’s series of Mob movies, this one tracking the career of Frank Sheeran (Robert de Niro) – an ambitious driver turned fixer associated with the Philadelphia mob bosses Angelo Bruno & Russel Bufalino (Joe Pesci). The movie ultimately turns into a Jimmy Hoffa story, as Hoffa – played by Al Pacino – is disappeared by the mob when he begins chafing at his replacement in the Teamsters Union by Tony Pro, a Teamster captain who was a lot closer to the mob than Hoffa was.
Casino, 1995. Robert DiNiro, Joe Pesci, Frank Vincent, James Woods, Sharon Stone. DeNiro plays Ace Rothstein, who is tapped to manage a mob-owned casino in Las Vegas. His buddy Joe Pesci, a made guy in the Mob who has an unfortunate tendency to mess things up in a violent way, tags along. DeNiro makes things worse by marrying a woman who is obvious trouble and then being fool enough to trust her even after she repeatedly demonstrates she has a bizarre hangup for her former boyfriend, a loser and scam artist. A re-watch for me, but it’s been 20 years. The main thing I enjoyed was seeing Frank Vincent in a minor role; he played my favorite antagonist in The Sopranos, the Shah of Iran AKA Phil Leotardo.
About my Father, 2023. Robert DiNiro plays a Sicilian working-class dad whose son Sebastian is marrying into a hoity-toity WASP family. DiNiro insists on meeting the family before he’ll give Sebastian the family ring used for engagements, and hilarity ensues. While it frequently drifts into the absurd, ultimately it proves to be a sweet story about a father and son. Allegedly based on a true story.
“My dad loves the 4th of July. “ “Why? Because he was in the military?” “No, because it’s the only holiday he didn’t have to buy a gift for.”
License to Wed, 2007. I’m fairly sure I watched this twenty years ago, because I don’t miss anything Robin Williams related. The story is simple: Jon Krasinksi and Mandy Moore want to get married, but Mandy’s family has a tradition of getting married at St. Augustine’s, which is pastored by Father Frank (Robin Williams). The supporting cast has a LOT of people from The Office, including Angela Kinsey and Brian Baumgartner, so I’m guessing it was filmed between Office seasons. The movie bounds from sweet to silly to sacrilegious: it’s a fairly awful depiction of a Catholic priest, from his acceptance of cohabitation before marriage to the fact that he’s wearing gold vestments when it’s plainly not Easter or something comparable. Prop departments, take notice: green vestments are always safest unless you’re telling a Christmas story. Considering that the story is supposed to be about weddings in a religious context, I thought it very peculiar that the theology of marriage was absolutely absent. It’s not surprising given the amount of slapstick humor – this is not a serious film – but still noticeable to me.
Jobs, 2013. Another rewatch: I can’t remember when I first watched this, but during this re-watch all I could think of was “Wow, the Fassbender version is SO much better”. I periodically binge on clips from the Fassbender version because his performance of Jobs is so complex, especially when he’s butting heads with Seth Rogan’s unexpectedly good Steve Wozniak. Anyway, this is a biopic of Steve Jobs featuring Ashton Kutcher, covering Apple from its garage creation to the launch of the iPod, which turned Apple from a struggling tech company into a behemoth.
Two for the Money, 2005. Pacino & McConaughey? Alright, alright, alright! Matt plays a high school football star whose future career in pro ball is blitzed by an injury; while he waits for healing and his attempt to enter the draft again, he starts handicapping sports betting and proves to have quite a knack for it. Al Pacino, who borrows from his Milton in The Devil’s Advocate, is a professional handicapper whose firm gamblers pay for leads; he hires on McConaughey and soon the two are raking in the money – but then McConaughey’s gift seems to disappear. I watched this for the lead actors and that was about the only reason to watch it.
BlackBerry, 2023. This proved to be an all-around interesting movie about the rise and fall of Blackberry, though in my background reading I see that it took liberties with its characters. We see a couple of nerd-engineers who have found a genius idea failing to pitch it successfully, then being bailed out by an corporate insider who is not a techie but who knows how to pitch an idea and run a company. He drives them to greatness, but then his new interests (buying sports teams) and the unexpected arrival of the iPhone enter the picture. I gotta say, I loved the late 1990s/early 2000s nerd culture, from the DOOM t-shirts to the company LAN party paying Command and Conquer. I also read Losing the Signal, a history of the rise and fall of BlackBerry shortly after this, and let me say – the movie took a LOT of liberties with the characters. The corpo was familiar with the field, for instance, and he was not fired for delivering someone else’s pitch; his company was bought out by another and he was made redundant. The book also goes into far more detail on how BlackBerry struggled to adapt to the iphone and its infrastructure: the BlackBerry team weren’t caught by surprise by the iPhone, but the product they’d created was simply too different (in terms of its security architecture) to allow for an easy pivot to the iPhone’s data-driven approach.
Blast from the Past, 1999. A rewatch with the lady-friend. This is an old favorite and one I’ve rewatched many times over the years. A wealthy but eccentric engineer builds a fallout shelter for himself and his pregnant wife: in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they retreat into it just in case things go southwards. As it happens, one thing does go southward: a jet, which plows into their house and sets off the containment measures. 35 years later, the engineer’s son emerges into a very changed world and hilarity ensues. “Adam” is basically an Ozzie and Harriet kind of guy in a Seinfield world, so most of the humor comes from the dissonance – but so does its charm, because Adam is a sweet guy who makes a couple of friends who don’t know what to make of someone who is so un-cynical. It’s clearly been a while since I watched this, since I was startled to see Nathan Fillon from Firefly and to recognize Sissy Spacek as the mother.
Another Simple Favor, 2025. Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively return as besties-most-likely-to-murder-one-another. If you haven’t watched A Simple Favor, close your eyes and hum if you don’t want spoilers. Blake Lively is out of prison – the prison Anna put her in last time – and is getting married. She’s invited Anna to said wedding. Why? Who knows?! This has the same perverse energy as the first movie – where beauty and funny and menace are all mixed together, where teases and flirts and threats are NOT far apart. As with the first movie, there’s a delicious plot twist that puts things on their head. The cinematography is quite well done, though I can’t give specifics without spoiling a bit. Anna Kendrick is ever adorable, and Blake Lively excels as the attractive but dangerous femme fatale. She shows a lot of acting range here, but again no specifics because of spoilers.
“You’re going to watch your [book] sales and followers soar as you maid-of-honor the woman who tried to murder you! Did I mention it was in Capri? ….if I do try to murder you, it will make an amazing sequel.”
“What did she say to you to convince you to come to this farce?” “Oh….a little emotional blackmail, potential lawsuit, dangling my livelihood over my head. You know, just girlfriend stuff.” “Well. Here’s to murderous girlfriends and murderous exes.”
Mrs. Doubtfire, 1993. Robin Williams plays an irresponsible but loving father who is divorced by Sally Field; after learning that she’s looking to hire a housekeeper (rather than let him spend time with the kids in the afternoons), he decides to ….be an elderly pseudo-Scottish housekeeper! Lots of physical comedy and emotional drama ensues. This is a rewatch for me: I know I watched it in the 1990s on VHS, and at least one time thereafter, but it’s been a long time – like, I don’t think I’ve seen it in my adult life. Portions of the film are MUCH funnier because I understand the film references, from “I’m ready for my close-up!” to the montage where Robin Williams is channeling Tom Cruise in Risky Business.
The Public, 2018. Emilio Estevez is a humble librarian working in Cinncinati’s main library downtown. When a large group of homeless people refuse to leave the library and began barricading the doors, Estevez stays behind. Although at first I thought he was doing this to keep an eye on them and try to meditate the inevitable police situation, as the movie progresses we learn Estevez’ character was once homeless himself, and found sobriety and hope through the library. An interesting movie for class discussion. I had some doubts about how accurately libraries are shown here: there’s no constant din of people’s cellphones, and his homeless people are all very well groomed and read books while they’re occupying the library, as opposed to talking to the voices in their head. To the degree that mental illness shows up here, it borders on being fun eccentricism instead of deeply unsettling and dangerous. I used to have to regularly confiscate hedgetrimmers from a patron who later murdered a woman in a bookstore, so I don’t have the same rosy perspective as say, a comfortable screenwriter.
In my Hail to the Chief series, I am embarking on a Trilogy of Unknowns: Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, and Chester A. Arthur. The only one I’d recognize in a lineup is Arthur because of his wonderful lambchops: they know how to style facial hair back then! Hayes, on first reading , is remarkably like Grover Cleveland, at least one moves past the military record. While Cleveland had no apparent interest in the War, Hayes was a zealous Unionist who served as an officer in the war, taking credit for helping to create the Battle of South Mountain and being wounded in the process. Where they converge is that Hayes became a successful attorney, and on seeking public office, rose to the role of Governor and was known for his dedication to clean government and solid money. Despite this, though, he entered into office under a storm of scandal: because Reconstruction was already fading fast away, there were disputes over who had truly won three states, and particularly who had won Florida. Deciding the vote ultimately came down to a commission, which voted entirely on party lines: the newly appointed President Hayes now had to execute the responsibilities of his office while knowing half the country viewed him as entirely illegitimate. John Quincy Adams labored under similar circumstances, his own election having been decided in the House of Representatives. Hayes applied his principles by being a stick;er for the gold standard, and on ending the spoils system that allowed political offices to be given out as a reward for electoral support, rather than merit. Although he sometimes catches flack for “ending Reconstruction”, the author points out that most of the South had already been ‘redeemed’ by the Bourbons, and that the last three were fast on the way. The North had lost interest in occupying and managing the South, but Hayes did his best to safeguard the new rights of black Americans and to bring the country together again. This biography delivers a strong impression of him as a man of principle, even sticking to his early declaration to only serve one term so that his actions in office would not be predicated on the desire to be popular, only to do the right thing.
(My punny title comes from the fact that Hayes was a huge fan of proto-baseball, and was playing it well before there were standard rules. This was alas, not mentioned here.)
Imagine, dear reader, that you encountered an obviously abandoned composition notebook in a cafe or library, and picked it up to find an invitation to tell your darkest secrets and fears. What would you say? That’s the premise of The Authenticity Project, in which an aging artist’s idea to confess his loneliness starts a chain reaction and creates a tight community from a group of relative strangers: the book passes from hand to hand, moving as far as Thailand before returning to England’s green and pleasant hills. The result is a book that’s a wonderfully sweet story about human connection, but not one that’s saccarine: the book brings people together, but it also creates its own drama, and even without it people are good causing drama all on their own. This was my introduction to Clare Pooley, and I suspect she may be for me a Rachel Joyce-like author on whom I binge.
Although the cast of this book increases steadily as the months wear on, our principle characters are Julian and Monica, both of whom live in the same neighborhood of London. Julian is an aging artist who used to consort with all the high-fashion creators of the day, and has a house filled with outrageous outfits: Monica is an accomplished but frustrated cafe owner, a woman with a background in law and business who instead chose to create a place for people to enjoy good coffee and company in a homey cafe with its own library. Julian confesses his loneliness, and Monica her desire for a husband and family despite being raised to be an archfeminist: she cites the Pankhursts as readily as Christians do Jesus. When Julian leaves the notebook with his confessions about being a poor husband to his late wife, Monica is inspired: she approaches him and asks if he would be willing to teach art classes in her cafe on a weekly basis. This is the nucleus of a community that grows throughout the book; each character brings their own failures and dashed hopes, but they also bring with them a desire to help the other lives they encounter in the book. There are complications, however; two people begin drawing close, but then the woman recoils when she realizes the man knows ‘all about her’ through the book, and another man has deep-seated addictions that he’s not quite finished battling. They will affect both him and the people who have grown attached to him as the book wears on.
This is an incredibly sweet story about found-family and community, and the author nicely balances stress and drama as she tells it. The only fly in the soup is that it might not have happened if people hadn’t so readily provided their real names; the London neighborhood this is set in is cozy enough that people can figure out who the writer are with context. However, Pooley is still able to maintain the tension between reality and appearances even within that context — most tellingly, in one scene where a frustrated young mother spies a couple dancing in a cafe, and yearns for what they want. In reality, the situation is far more complicated, and it makes the tension even more interesting for the reader who is growing to realize that even what’s confessed in the notebook may not be the True Story. I shall definitely be reading more of Ms. Pooley!
Quotations
Julian didn’t avoid the bad memories. If anything, he encouraged them. They were his penance.
Sometimes, Riley wished he’d never found The Authenticity Project. He didn’t like knowing other people’s secrets—it felt like prying. Yet, once he’d read their stories, he hadn’t been able to forget about Julian, Monica, and Hazard. It was like being partway through a novel, becoming invested in the characters, then leaving it on a train before you reached the end.
Reading Freely 