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Fools%u2019 Journey560Because our reading was focused on non-fiction, we leaned toward biography, history, travel, etc. But also books covering a wide range of other subjects, such as transportation, science, health, religion, crime %u2014 even linguistics %u2014 as well as many difficultto-categorize topics. Popular areas of interest from the past have included all aspects of the space age, as well as biographies and histories related to the Manhattan Project. Although we didn%u2019t care for all their books, some of our favorite authors, for both writing style and preferred subjects, have included Paul Theroux, David McCullough, Jeffery Toobin, Bill Bryson, Sarah Vowell, Oliver Sachs, Mary Roach, and Bob Woodward. Plus countless writers who were destined to have only one title to their name.When starting a new book, it would typically take me just a few pages to get into a rhythm with the author%u2019s style of writing. But when an author used a lot of quotations, each having a different voice, I%u2019d often stumble in my reading. This would usually happen when a book had many quotes from a different era or a non-standard sentence structure. In such cases, when going from the author%u2019s voice to a quote, I%u2019d find myself looking carefully at each word the quote, rather that absorbing the whole sentence, and my comprehension would falter. In such cases, I%u2019d often set the book aside and pick up a new one. After all, we were reading for pleasure, and I didn%u2019t want to have to work so hard to follow the story. This was only a problem when reading aloud to Lynn. It didn%u2019t happen if I was reading silently to myself, likely because I was able to mentally slur through an unusual sentence structure, or a different voice, and still absorb the meaning. Interestingly, we read some biographies of early Russian leaders that were loaded with quotations, yet were quite easy to read. The reason was probably because the authors translated the quotes into English themselves, so everything ended up in their own voices.We%u2019d only read a handful of political biographies over the years because we often found the writing dull. That changed after we finished the first volume of Robert Caro%u2019s biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power. Neither Lynn nor I cared for Johnson, but Caro%u2019s writing was so good that we read all four volumes %u2014 close to 3,000 pages. By the time we got through them, we were hoping