We began reading in unison. I read Portrait of a Lady aloud and we took turns reading Kon Tiki, then moved on to Margaret Drabble and Graham Greene, and then our reading diverged.

Chris loves to open a book and find a geographical world he knows nothing about. I love to open a book and find an interior world I can relate to.

For his birthday I bought Chris Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts which depicts walking across Europe, and he bought me Book One of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, with an inscription on the first page: What? Thirty years with a Norwegian? What?

Knausgaard goes deep inside. Interiority is a place Chris is more likely to go with Henry James or by reading letters of dead people—but he read My Struggle because he’d read a good review in the Times, and Knausgaard was Norwegian and Chris got interested because he is married to a Norwegian-American who loved it. I relished the unflinching look at shame, which felt so visceral and oddly validating, and he was taken with the relationship between father and son, and so, in that book, we had a moment of inward-looking convergence.

He bought Book Two and inscribed it: For my Norwegian writer without the goatee.

We are interested in each others’ family backgrounds and yet just because a book works for him doesn’t mean it will work for me. His mother is Viennese, which explains his interest in the 1683 siege of Vienna in The Enemy at the Gate, but that book was too much straight-up history for me. I preferred A Nervous Splendor about the ten months in Vienna, between July 1988 and May 1989, building up to the murder/suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera. Vienna was initially the draw, but it was the tragic love story, and the fact that Freud made an appearance that cinched it for me.

Chris doesn't care much for memoirs. He has never read Anne Lamott, the writer who made me want to write, but he has read Lydia Davis, another favorite of mine, who straddles memoir and fiction and poetry. Chris loves poetry but I only love one poet, Jane Kenyon, who describes depression perfectly, yet experiences joy, and grew up on my very street in my hometown of Ann Arbor. I have never read Elizabeth Bishop but I have heard Chris recite Bishop’s “One Art,” so often, when I have lost things, that I can recite the first stanza—The art of losing isn’t hard to master—by heart.

My greatest comfort is P.D. James whose emotional restraint and long smart sentences I read again and again, making discoveries each time, like the author’s love of the word “susurration,” to describe the sound of the sea, and how her protagonist stops in to see a village church, and picnics along a seaside path, on his way somewhere, which reminds me of the kind of thing Chris likes to do.

Chris has explored an English-themed thread for decades that started when we read most of Graham Greene together. Greene led to him to read Evelyn Waugh, and to Nancy Mitford, and Muriel Spark, and Norman Douglas, and Compton McKenzie, and Harold Acton, and Robert Byron, and E. M. Forster and Ronald Knox, and so on.

Recently Chris turned back to Evelyn Waugh's travel essay on Abyssinia, reporting on the coronation of Haile Selassie, so Chris read The Rastafarians by Leonard E. Barrett Sr. and Haile Selassie Emperor of Ethiopia by Princess Asfa Vilna to try to make sense of it all.

It would never occur to me to go so deeply into Abyssinia with Evelyn Waugh. But because Chris did I didn't have to and then one Sunday afternoon Chris led me and Richard and Nancy on a walk through upper Manhattan stopping at all the Abyssinian and Rastafarian sites.

Our reading takes both of us, through each of our divergent interests, to new places. Chris trusts Waugh to lead him to unknown geographical worlds, and I trust Chris to lead me out of my existential angst. And Chris trusts me to direct his gaze from the far horizon and point it at the heart.

But more on that another time.