“And so shines a good deed in a weary world,” that’s the line that ran through my head as I finished John Nolte’s first novel, Borrowed Time. The truth is that I didn’t want it to end. I didn’t want to leave that imaginative world and have to face the reality of ours.

I had already started it over just before the last few chapters to stave off the inevitable. Was it the book’s protagonist I liked so much? A man blessed (or cursed) with immortality who falls in love for the first time in thousands of years with someone who does get old and die, like the rest of us?

Or was it something else: A distant call from the past, back to the days when stories were meant for everyone when we would all share the plight of characters so real we could almost reach out and touch them?

I read, or listen to, dozens — hundreds — of audiobooks. It’s how I pass the time on long road trips, enduring agonizingly boring chores I can’t bear to face, or when I need to turn my mind off from the day's news. I read almost exclusively mysteries, thrillers, pulpy stuff, with the occasional non-fiction book thrown in here or there about the Salem Witch Trials or Lizzie Borden.

I usually don’t touch literary fiction anymore. I can’t bear to. I know what to expect because I know that world all too well by now. There will be a “lesson” in there, one I can already see coming from a mile away.

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