After getting through the three-book series on AIDS in Swedish, I told someone I would ‘take a break’. He found it, in his words, ‘ridiculously endearing’ that for me, reading a “fluffy” book is the break. For him, a break would be to cease reading entirely, grabbing the remote and feeding his eyes with mindless cop shows or football matches. For me, a break is putting away the Dostoevsky-heavy books and reading something lightweight, like the music memoirs of Kim Gordon or Carrie Brownstein (I’m even considering something like Duff McKagan’s How to Be a Man right now). These are easy and relatively entertaining reads.

See, I can’t stop reading now that I am back up at the plate. I will stay put and keep hitting foul tips if I have to. (I could maybe put baseball language to bed, though.) As I said to someone the other day, we can’t live our lives as though they stretch on for untold decades. I don’t have regrets, but if I were to, I do ask myself what I was thinking all those years not reading much of anything at all. I can’t get the last decade back. I was not in the right frame of mind to hoover up this much stuff, or even anything close to this kind of volume, but maybe a few bits more would not have hurt.