Hello everybody. How are you doing today? I hope you're doing well and I hope your reading is going well.

Today I would love to talk to you about a topic that is very near and dear to my heart.

And that topic is that of special author projects. A special author project is when you choose to focus on a specific writer and read their entire body of work, a specific writer who you have fallen in love with.

Now, I say you choose, but falling in love, one might contest, is not a choice.

We do not fall in love with every single book.

We don't fall in love with everybody we meet.

It's a rather rare occurrence in which we glimpse something of ourselves in another.

We find ourselves to be in sympathy with another. Another person seems to be

us and they know intuitively how to talk to us personally, how to move our souls. And so we read

through the great books and some books we appreciate on an intellectual level. Some books we

appreciate for the historical

insight they provide, for the conversations they spark.

But every now and then we get that rare special writer who sparks something more powerful

in us.

And these writers who we love help us to live.

We talk about living the great books and in that imperative

live the great books is the implicit idea that these books help us to stay alive. We realize who is

most special to us when we go through difficult times. We realize who means the most to us in our lives,

our friendships, our family. And the same is true when it comes to great literature too. Who are

those authors that we instinctively reach for when times get tough? And when times get tough,

we typically find that we're not dealing with one thing at a time big

life events stressful events typically come in groups not one by one we have one

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