beginnings and middles and ends, and if you didn’t like a part, you could skip to the next chapter. If someone died, you could stop on the last page before, and they’d live on forever. Happy endings were definite, evils defeated, and the good lasted forever. And books about travel? They promised wide-eyed wonders. They waxed poetically about the history and the culture of the places, like an anthropologist of once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
