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In Borders recently, I was completing an agonizing second round through the Fiction/Literature section, trying to find something, anything, that would blunt the come-down from the lovely Watership Down (would it be wrong to name a child Thlayli? No?), when a woman flipped open her phone and called the parent of a child who was in the same class as her own child.

Woman: "What are they reading in English class?"

Me: [thinking] Oh, how nice - she's going to read along with her child and discuss the book with him!

Woman: "It's Old Man and the Sea, right?"

Me: [thinking] What a devoted mother. I should do that, too, if I ever have a sixth grader.

Woman: "Yeah, I'm buying him the Cliffs Notes."