I have read more this year than any other, but that doesn’t feel like a triumph. It felt compulsive and escapist in a bad way, regardless of whether the books were good.
In that big life story that you tell somebody—that myth that you tell people—you wouldn’t talk about things that just happened quietly every day and yet those things are the very material of that big sweeping story. Those little moments, those little interactions are who you are; every day is what makes up your life.