Hello, I'm David Kern.

I'm Heidi White.

I'm Karen Swallow Pryor.

And you were listening to Close Reads, a podcast for the Incurable Reader on which we are discussing

Thomas Hardy's very long novel, Test of the Derbivilles.

Very long, but very good and very interesting.

And we are going to discuss phase the fifth today.

And then, as you might remember from last week, we're going to be off next week.

And then the following week after that, we're going to discuss the end of the book.

So phase is six and seven.

And then we'll do the Q&A episode after that. So we'll

have three more test episodes. And then after that, we're going to do a couple episodes, just as a

reminder of a month in the country, which is quite a bit shorter. So, you know, just kind of a

some variety of length.

Phase the fifth, for those who are wondering, if you don't have an edition that marks that clearly,

is through Chapter 44. Somebody told me that they had trouble figuring out the phase things,

because some of the additions didn't mark it as distinctively as your edition does, Karen.

So this is. Yeah, I didn't know there were additions that didn't do that. I don't know if it was

that they didn't do it at all or if they just don't market. Your addition is just very clear.

You know, and it says even in the page headers, each page, it tells you

what phase you're in, whereas not a lot of fiction, you know, it just has the page numbers

on the page. So you just kind of, when you're trying to figure out where you are, it can be a little

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