Nobody in This Book Has a Job

Sadie Stein's grandfather in Monterey County built six sheds to hold his books, and left ten of them a night on his granddaughter's bed, to be read by morning. That is where she comes from, and it shaped how she reads Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: fast, widely, and without a drop of sentimentality. The series opens with the reader before the book, a family of writers, an education with no syllabus, the one thing about books she refuses to say. Then the famous question, what is this novel about, and an answer that pivots on something her four-year-old son asked her. The episode's title is the answer's first surprise.