I’m sitting in the bedroom of a rented cottage in Maine as my wife and our two young children eat breakfast downstairs. Outside, a pearl-gray fog unfurls gently over the water. Foghorns blare. Seagulls shriek. Edward Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” calls out to me. G.F. Young’s “The Medici” sings its siren song. Van Wyck Brooks’s “New England: Indian summer” purrs.

Ah, the summer reading list! The stress of work is giving way, at last, to the stress of leisure.

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