Hello, I'm David Kern.

I'm Heidi White. I'm Karen Swallow Breyer.

And you're listening to Close Reeds, a podcast for the Incurable Reader on which we are discussing Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the Derbervilles.

And we're going to talk about the rest of phase one, which if you have an edition or you're listening on an audiobook that doesn't break out those phases, I believe is chapters 5 through 11.

Is it 6 through 11?

5 through 11, something like that?

I know it ends at 11.

And so we're going to talk about a number of different things.

I'll just say that's at the top.

At the end of this episode, we're going to talk about the end of Chapter 11,

which I'll mention it again later,

but that section does have some topics

that we probably would recommend you be judicious

and careful about who listens alongside you.

I know some of you listen with children.

We love that. You know,

this might be a section that you need to be cautious about that. So we're going to save that for the

end of the episode. So if they want to listen with you for the first part, then you can decide what

kind of conversations you want to have with your kids about those topics later on. First of though,

Heidi, Karen, how is it going? Karen, how are you?

I'm great. This is like the highlight of my week, so here we are. Well, that's awesome. That's great.

Heidi, how are you? I'm doing great, David. How about you? I'm well. So I just want to say something

...