“Thank the Lord,” she exclaims. “I’ve read this. I was worried because I hadn’t even heard of the others. I felt so small. In all the other piles not one name I recognized. I felt inadequate.” “Don’t,” I say. “I’m the one who should feel so.” “But I’ve read Anna Karenina,” she says. “I read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as a young girl. It’s been a long time, but I did.” “It’s been a long time for me as well.” Those were the books that led me down this path, the books responsible for both the peak and the abyss.
