I have a niece who is as much of a reader as I am. She’s 12 and can’t get enough of books. I hope as I write this she’s taken my suggestion to heart and started in on Jane Austen — she reads at the high school level already. We were talking last week on her birthday about reading and how she gets up an hour early sometimes — at 4:45 a.m. — to read. I told her sometimes I stay up that late to read. You’re reading along and think you’ll stop at the next chapter, because that’s the place to stop. But then you read the first few sentences of the next chapter and you have to continue on. Because you can’t stop until there’s an author-approved break, right? Niece agrees with me. Neither of us understand Husband, who says once the book is his property, he can read it any old way he chooses. Which he does. He’ll read from the front, from the middle, from the back. He’ll jump around fiction, leap around biographies. It drives me insane.

I tell him that if I ever write a book and he doesn’t read it from front to back, stopping only at chapter or other longer-then-a-paragraph-return break, I will die just to come back and haunt him. And frankly, if there are any dead authors reading this blog, I hereby give you permission to come pull a stunt like Lazer Wolf’s wife did in Fiddler on the Roof to keep Tzeitl from marrying her widower.

He says I get a little Hasidic about some things. Maybe, but not that many. I can think of three. First, reading books from front to back and stopping only at those author-created breaks.

Second, we live in America, where we pronounce the letter H in most circumstances. Where we do pronounce that letter, say in the word historic, we should precede it with the indefinite article “a”, not “an”. We don’t say “an horse”, do we?

Third, there are only five kinds of bagel: plain, salt, poppy seed, sesame seed, and onion. I’m almost willing to grandfather in cinnamon raisin because they’ve been around so long and they taste really good toasted with cream cheese. All others — those that are green, with chocolate chips, pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, blueberries, pizza sauce, or peanuts and red pepper (a Thai bagel concoction that won Husband a prize from a local bagel bakery years ago) — are donut-shaped bread-food. Further, a real bagel doesn’t come in a plastic bag with five other presliced fluffy round things. Bagels are like hockey pucks the second day and even on the first day, they are hard to sink your teeth into unless you toast them.

I don’t think Hasidic is the word for these feelings. I think the proper word is “right”.

I’m going to go read now. Possibly until the wee hours, unless I find a good chapter break at which to stop.