“He had a strange relationship with books. He had the notion that people who wrote novels were also lonely. He believed this more and more, reading between the lines of the novels he’d loved. Most books were about one kind of loneliness or another, about people who couldn’t get what they wanted, people who found things hard, who were slow, or sad, or difficult. So he read most evenings, finding a comfort in following words written by someone like him.”
