In many ways, books were more alive than most of the people he knew. They were living, breathing entities that changed each time you picked them up. When he was a young man, every book had been an opportunity to see the world from a place of safety and comfort, to travel to exotic destinations he’d been unable to afford and too shy to explore on his own. As a middle-aged man, he’d found books to be less about hope and more about finding the discrepancies between what fiction had promised and reality delivered. And as an old man…well. He wasn’t sure about that part yet. These days, he was
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