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 I've had [a:Chaim Potok|7385|Chaim Potok|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1472717039p2/7385.jpg]'s 1967 [b:The Chosen|187181|The Chosen (Reuven Malther, #1)|Chaim Potok|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403191327l/187181.SY75.jpg|1336083] on my to-be-read list since 1988. That was when a woman I was nuts about told me it was her favorite book. She majored in English and graduated with honors, so I respected her judgment. Also, she had been born in Hong Kong, grew up from the age of four in Los Angeles, and went to college in Minnesota. I don't think she had spent any time on the East Coast when I knew her, and certainly not in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, which is where The Chosen takes place.
 It's about the academic and social maturing of two Jewish boys, both sons of prominent rabbis, who meet in their high school years during the last year of World War II. It ends in 1950, when they are in college. They study with the intensity and focus of athletes, and even though what much of their study is about, the Talmud, doesn't interest me, the way they've chosen to spend their lives as scholars—a choice that evolves into psychology for one of them—is something that's always appealed to dumb me.
 This novel has absolutely no hint of sex in it. At one point, one of the boys politely remarks that the other's sister is attractive. The remark is batted away and there's no mention of girls again.
 Potok cleverly started The Chosen with a lengthy description of a high-school softball game. What happens there begins the action of the novel in a way that invites American readers who may have no knowledge of or interest in Judaism.

 I was ready to like [a:Nathan Harris|21291170|Nathan Harris|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1616057232p2/21291170.jpg]'s [b:The Sweetness of Water|54404602|The Sweetness of Water|Nathan Harris|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1593989595l/54404602.SY75.jpg|84896483] well enough but not ready to think much of it as I was certain it would be diminished by my having read [a:Shirley Hazzard|7486|Shirley Hazzard|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1418422924p2/7486.jpg]'s [b:The Great Fire|11737|The Great Fire|Shirley Hazzard|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327998858l/11737.SX50.jpg|2453617] right before it, and that is a stupendous book.
 I was wrong; Sweetness is strong enough that you can read the best book you've ever read, find a pile of money, go into space, and give birth and it will be undiminished by any of those distractions. The first pages prepared me for an interesting story and I got that. What I didn't expect was to find so much magic on the page of a debut novel.
 It was long-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize. The winner that year was [a:Damon Galgut|64459|Damon Galgut|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1246536783p2/64459.jpg]'s [b:The Promise|54633172|The Promise|Damon Galgut|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1619750215l/54633172.SY75.jpg|85240090]. I'd loved The Promise. I'd have chosen Sweetness over it, though that might be my American bias showing.

 His love had never been gracious, and he had no means to recognize what Isabelle might require of him—the necessities of her grief. There were few times as a grown man he could recall being intimidated, but the door to Caleb's room, where she had locked herself up, was so overwhelming that he had to lean against the hallway wall just to settle his bones. He moved forward, reassured by the sliver of lamplight that reached under the doorframe and lazed over his feet—the only signal that she was within.
 "Isabelle." Somehow his voice cracked even on the single word. He stepped back and put his hands on his hips, then stepped forward to try again. "Isabelle," he said. "I've made a stew."

 I can look up from my computer screen and see some of the books I've read over the past year or so. I liked them all, but when I look at them I realize I don't remember much about some of them. [b:The Exiles|49397137|The Exiles|Christina Baker Kline|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1585357375l/49397137.SY75.jpg|73236056] was good, I think, or I would have donated to my library's used bookstore by now, but I'd have to pick it up and look at a few pages to refresh my memory.
 That won't happen with [a:Shirley Hazzard|7486|Shirley Hazzard|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1418422924p2/7486.jpg]'s [b:The Great Fire|11737|The Great Fire|Shirley Hazzard|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327998858l/11737.SX50.jpg|2453617]. It is so wondrously good that I actually began rereading it before I was finished reading it. I wanted to see if passages I'd read were as good as I'd thought they were while I was reading them, or whether it was because of something new to me about her style that made me think they were.
 They were objectively that good. Think of the best writing by [a:Emma Cline|2926065|Emma Cline|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1448177198p2/2926065.jpg] or [a:Karen Russell|26417|Karen Russell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1295563225p2/26417.jpg] and add in [a:James Salter|11298|James Salter|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1360177449p2/11298.jpg] and Hazzard's her own style I'm much too unliterary to talk about. It's the best book I've read in years, and I can't wait to read [b:The Transit of Venus|12738|The Transit of Venus|Shirley Hazzard|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347622666l/12738.SY75.jpg|1178456].
 Much of it takes place in Japan during the post WWII occupation.

Long and narrow, the lounge had possibly been a dormitory. Furnished now by a scattering of vermilion chairs in false leather, and by an improvised bar, on trestles at the far end of the room, where a score of servicemen and a dozen nurses stood talking and laughing and flirting under a canopy of tobacco smoke; dropping ash from fingers and spilling drink from paper cups. The table was ranged with bottles and scattered with dropped nuts and flaked potatoes. The men were, in varying degrees, drunk. The younger women had unrolled their regulation hair for the evening. Some of them were pretty, and had exchanged their uniforms for coloured dresses; and wore, on slim wrists, the linked bracelets of gunmetal, black and gilt, improvised by Japanese peddlers from the fallen scraps of war and sold to conquerors on the streets of ruined cities. Two or three of the girls trilled and twirled to imaginary music while a soldier, who knelt at their feet, was setting up a gramophone from a ganglion of wires.

 A family member had spinal meningitis when she was a baby and it left her deaf. She got a cochlear implant and hears well enough to function normally. I mention this because [a:Sara Nović|8288614|Sara Nović|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1643757788p2/8288614.jpg]'s [b:True Biz|58395049|True Biz|Sara Nović|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1642403959l/58395049.SY75.jpg|85399916] is about deaf teenagers and it addresses issues surrounding deafness.
 It's not just about teenagers but enough about them that it could pass as a Young Adult book. It's a sort of cri de coeur about the cultural issues around deafness. But it's not only that; if it were I'd have not liked it much. It seems like every other TV series has deaf characters in them and while I'm all for it, it slows the storytelling to a crawl. They always try to get around it by having someone who's not deaf but can sign say everything out loud, but that always comes off as fake.

 The atmosphere in the dorm the night before Christmas break was charged, holiday giddiness undercut by a run of tension because of what going home meant for so many River Valley students. Kayla, Charlie, and the rest of the girls on the floor spent the evening in and out of the common room, where the dormkeepers had set up stations for them to make gifts to bring to their families—origami ornaments and construction paper cards. Even Kayla seemed eager for the semester's end, but Charlie could not tap into the Christmas spirit. Another holiday to spend sitting at the table, bewildered and bored, trying to lipread her chewing mother. Until now, it hadn't occurred to her to wish for something better.

 Well, let's just say it's not for me. Which makes me disappointed in myself because the reason it's not for me is that I'm too stupid to understand much of it.
 I should have majored in English in college. If I had, I'd have learned to read more deeply than I do now and gotten more out of the books I've read since. Good literature reflects life, so I'd have gotten more out of life, too. As it is, I'm a shallow moron who skims only the surface of things.
 If you agree with Kurt Vonnegut on the following, avoid this book: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
 By the way, you can access Cliff notes on it online for free and reading them has helped me understand [b:Mrs. Dalloway|14942|Mrs. Dalloway|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1646148221l/14942.SY75.jpg|841320] a little.
Excerpt:

 Such are the visions. The solitary traveller is soon beyond the wood; and there, coming to the door with shaded eyes, possibly to look for his return, with hands raised, with white apron blowing, is an elderly woman who seems (so powerful is this infirmity) to seek, over a desert, a lost son; to search for a rider destroyed; to be the figure of the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world. So, as the solitary traveller advances down the village street where the women stand knitting and the men dig in the garden, the evening seems ominous; the figures still; as if some august fate, known to them, awaited without fear, were about to sweep them into complete annihilation.

 I'm old enough to remember the era during which [a:Louise Kennedy|513351|Louise Kennedy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1678816563p2/513351.jpg]'s debut novel took place, the Troubles, which was the time from the late 1960s to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 in Northern Ireland during which 3,500 people were killed—over half of them civilians—as factions of Ireland fought to get the British out of Ireland.
 The inside flap makes it sound like [b:Trespasses|60417483|Trespasses|Louise Kennedy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1644884868l/60417483.SY75.jpg|94106881] belongs on the romance shelf: "In Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a young woman is caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion." Not to disparage romantic fiction, but it's a lot smarter than most of those books and thematically doesn't have the same aims.
 Trespasses is at times depressing, sexy, tender, and heart wrenching as well as informative, not in an academic way but one in which you can feel how it would be to live in a country occupied by a foreign army. The central character, Cushla, is a twenty-four-year-old woman. There's a deceased father, an alcoholic mother, a bullied child, a hostile teen, and a middle-age sophisticate. A novel taking place today instead of 1975 wouldn't be considered diverse unless it had people of a variety of racial backgrounds and sexual identities, but considering this is set in a small town outside of Belfast, the variety of characters is great.

 He began to sing "The Town I Loved so Well," a song about how the Troubles had changed Derry. Everyone joined in; everyone but Cushla. As she listened, it struck her hard what an outsider she had become. In school and in college she had been surrounded by Catholic girls like her with whom she had swapped illicit copies of Edna O'Brien books and secrets. Cushla was the only one who lived outside Belfast, albeit just a few miles away. As things in the city worsened, she had begun to lose touch with them, and on the rare occasions they met now, they treated her like a tourist. She felt like one here, watching how easy the others were in themselves and with each other.

 The Seinfeld episode titled The Jacket featured a character based on the real life [a:Richard Yates|27069|Richard Yates|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1528115419p2/27069.jpg]. It was Elaine's father, Alton Benes, a writer. Larry David, a co-creator of Seinfeld had dated a daughter of Yates. The actor who portrayed him, Lawrence Tierney, was a legendary movie tough guy and the cast were so afraid of him that he was on the show just once. (It was supposed to be a recurring role.)
 This is unsurprising to anyone who's read something by Yates. [b:The Easter Parade|10796884|The Easter Parade|Richard Yates|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1300221044l/10796884.SX50.jpg|1352933] is an absorbing, fast-paced (I read it in just a day) story about two sisters, Sarah and Emily, the younger one in particular, as they grow up from childhood to middle age. It begins in 1930 and ends in the early 1970s. The other major character is their mother, who has encouraged her daughters to call her Pookie.
 Not one person comes off looking good in Easter Parade. They're all mediocre strivers who fail to reach they're dreams. If they say something witty or insightful it's always, Yates tells us, rehearsed or badly executed.
 It's a thoroughly depressing book, but one I recommend. Yates had cracked whatever mysterious code it is that makes writing readable.
 Excerpt:

 She served a lunch that was almost as inadequate as one of Pookie's meals; then the problem was that the conversation kept petering out. Sarah wanted to hear "everything" about Barnard, but when Emily began to talk she saw her sister's eyes glaze over in smiling boredom. Pookie said "Isn't this nice? Just the three of us together again?" But it wasn't really very nice at all, and for most of the afternoon they sat around the sparsely furnished living room in attitudes of forced conviviality, Pookie smoking many cigarettes and dropping ashes on the rug, three women with nothing much to say to one another.

 All these many years I'd thought it [a:Oscar Wilde|3565|Oscar Wilde|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1673611182p2/3565.jpg]'s [b:The Picture of Dorian Gray|1857397|The Picture of Dorian Gray|Oscar Wilde|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1314903532l/1857397.SY75.jpg|1858012] was simply about a painting that aged while its subject didn't.
 That's not wholly accurate. What happens is that the painting shows not only age but the negative side of Dorian Gray's being. The image begins to look cruel and evil as Dorian himself continues to look like an innocent handsome young man.
 Dorian is, by the way, what would now be called an influencer, and I'm waiting for something to come out about a YouTube star whose image and real being contrast in an interesting way.
 This book is so full of quotes that the page immediately inside the front cover references several of them. On nearly every page, though, you can find a Wilde witticism. He was the [a:Fran Lebowitz|8127311|Fran Lebowitz|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1536147926p2/8127311.jpg] of his day, which was the last decades of the nineteenth century. I don't know what the literary device is called, but Wilde uses contradictory balanced exchanges often. A: What about dumb people? B: Dumb people are the smartest of all.
Excerpt:

 "Never marry a woman with straw-colored hair, Dorian," he said, after a few puffs.
 "Why, Harry?"
 "Because they are so sentimental."
 "But I like sentimental people."
 "Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed."
 "I don't think I am likely to marry, Harry. I am too much in love. That is one of your aphorisms. I am putting it into practice as I do everything you say."

 At just 201 pages and with helpful illustrations, [a:Elizabeth Kolbert|45840|Elizabeth Kolbert|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1380812913p2/45840.jpg]'s [b:Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future|54814834|Under a White Sky The Nature of the Future|Elizabeth Kolbert|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1608039192l/54814834.SY75.jpg|85515756] goes fast and is interesting throughout for most, though every time I see yet another article or chapter about the levees in New Orleans my brain kind of shuts down.
 Under a White Sky questions whether or not we should do anything to correct the damage we've done to our only possible habitat. (The idea of making Mars livable is rubbish.) We've transformed over half the ice-free parts of the planet and will keep dumping carbon dioxide into the air—where it remains for centuries—for at least several decades to come. Kolbert quotes Horace saying in 20 BCE, "Drive out nature though you will with a pitchfork, yet she will always hurry back, and before you know it, will break through your perverse disdain in triumph." It only that were still true.
 If you've given up on the idea of repairing the planet, which I nearly do at times, the passage excerpted below may make you think again, as it did me. That which can be done can be undone.
Excerpt:

 We got to talking about climate history and human history. In Steffesen's view, these amounted to more or less the same thing. "If you look at the output of ice cores, it has really changed the picture of the world, our view of past climates and of human evolution," he told me. "Why did human beings not make civilization fifty thousand years ago?
 "You know that they had just as big brains as we have today," he went on. "When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginnings of a culture, they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial—ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it, it's amazing. Civilizations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was very stable. I think that if the climate would have been stable fifty thousand years ago, it would have started then. But they had no chance."

 I like short books like this one but sometimes they make me wonder about what makes something important to me. I come on them a few years later and have no memory of having read them. Is it because they were bad? No. [a:Éric Vuillard|877253|Éric Vuillard|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1505921377p2/877253.jpg]'s 132-page [b:The Order of the Day|41966091|The Order of the Day|Éric Vuillard|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1537623987l/41966091.SY75.jpg|86077745] is no worse than another book I read not long ago, [a:Herman Wouk|9020|Herman Wouk|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1266847920p2/9020.jpg]'s 783-page [b:Youngblood Hawke|42990|Youngblood Hawke|Herman Wouk|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440384487l/42990.SY75.jpg|769149], but the characters and story of Youngblood seeped into my brain over time so much that I remember it well.
 If you don't know much about the events leading up to World War II, it would be good to know that The Order of the Day is about the Anschluss, which was Hitler's Austria into the German Reich on March 13 of 1938. The novella is a fictional construction of that, and is interesting and the writing is terrific, even in its translated state. Vuillard is a poet, and the translator, [a:Mark Polizzotti (translator) Eric Vuillard|18455781|Mark Polizzotti (translator) Eric Vuillard|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] probably kept the poetry intact.
 By the end of if, you realize that more than anything, Order is a reminder of two things. One is that we all still patronize the corporations that made the rise of the Nazi party possible, and that many of those companies have offered little more than mild apologies for their deeds. Another is that history repeats itself.

 They listened. The basic idea was this: they had to put an end to a weak regime, ward off the Communist menace, eliminate trade unions and allow every entrepreneur to be the führer of his own shop. The speech lasted half an hour. When Hitler had finished, Gustave stood up, took a step forward, and, on behalf of all those present, thanked him for having finally clarified the political situation. The chancellor made a quick lap around the table on his way out. They congratulated him courteously. The old industrialists seemed relieved. Once he had departed, Goering took the floor, energetically reformulating several ideas, then returned to the March 5 elections. This was a unique opportunity to break out of the impasse they were in. But to mount a successful campaign, they needed money; the Nazi Party didn't have a blessed cent and Election Day was fast approaching. At that moment, Hjalmar Schacht rose to his feet, smiled a the assembly, and called out, "And now, gentlemen, time to pony up!"

 I got a lot out of [a:Vaclav Smil|5003|Vaclav Smil|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1619861469p2/5003.jpg]'s [b:How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future|56587388|How the World Really Works A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future|Vaclav Smil|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1641444915l/56587388.SY75.jpg|88381378] despite lacking the background to understand fairly large chunks of it. I probably fully understood about 80 percent of it, at best. (That's not a slam on the book but on me. I had to go to summer school one year because I flunked math and squeaked by other years. A large factor in deciding which college to attend was whether or not they required a year of math, as many did when I was applying.)
 This book will shatter any notions you might have about getting off fossil fuels in the time frame many hope for and consider feasible. It did for me, and I'm the starry-eyed optimistic type who's been using reusable bags, bicycling and taking mass transit when possible, recycling everything I can, using as little of possible of everything else, and keeping the thermostat low in winter and off or high (usually off) in summer since the early 1980s.
 Smil describes what he calls the four pillars of our current civilization. They are: Concrete, plastic, steel and ammonia. I know what you're thinking: Ammonia? Yes, because its synthesis is what has made fertilizing crops possible. Without it, we'd be unable to feed nearly half the people alive today. None of us has spent a day of our lives without all four of those items being a major part of our lives, except maybe ammonia if you fast for a day now and then.
 Although Smil may look like the angry uncle you have who denies climate change even now, he is not and he is in favor of taking action. One thing he highlights that would make a huge difference, for example, is drastically reducing the huge amount of food we waste.
 This book took me ages to read but it's just 229 pages long, not counting the notes. I usually prefer fiction, but How the World Really Works gave me the kind of insights you can't often get from fiction, and they're just as interesting.
Excerpt:

 How soon will we fly intercontinentally on a wide-body jet powered by batteries? News headlines assure us that the future of flight is electric—touchingly ignoring the huge gap between the energy density of kerosene burned by turbofans and today's best lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that would be on board these hypothetically electric planes. Turbofan engines powering jetliners burn fuel whose energy density is 46 megajoules per kilogram (that's nearly 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram), converting chemical to thermal and kinetic energy—while today's best Li-ion batteries supply less than 300 Wh/kg, more than a 40-fold difference. Admittedly, electric motors are roughly twice as efficient energy converters as gas turbines, and hence the effective energy gap is "only" about 20-fold. But during the past 30 years the maximum energy density of batteries has roughly tripled, and even if we were to triple that again densities would still be well below 3,000 Wh/kg in 2050—falling far short of taking a wide-body plane from New York to Tokyo or from Paris to Singapore, something we have been doing daily for decades with kerosene-fueled Boeings and Airbuses.

 The Guardian called [a:Claire Keegan|274817|Claire Keegan|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1309920304p2/274817.jpg]'s Foster "A thing of finely honed beauty." The Sunday Times said it is "A Small Miracle," and there are three pages more inside and five blurbs on the back cover of high praise for this 88-page book. And the person who gave it to me did so with the eagerness of a zealot.
 I don't get. It's OK. It's a short novella about a little girl who goes to live with kindly relatives in rural Ireland for the summer while her pregnant mother—who already has so many kids she made me think of the Every Sperm is Sacred sketch in Monty Python's the Meaning of Life—and her getting used to it.
 A funny thing is that Keegan is cagey about when the novel takes place. Plastic abounds, and there are cars, but people a couple hours away communicate by letter and there's no mention of a telephone. There's also no reference to radios or televisions. At some point I started wondering if it were some kind of post-apocalyptic story.
Excerpt:

 Downstairs, she fetches the zinc bucket from the scullery and takes me down the fields. At first I feel uneasy in the strange clothes, but walking along I grow that bit easier. Kinisella's fields are broad and level, divided in strips with electric fences which she says I must not touch—unless I want a shock. When the wind blows, sections of the longer grass bend over, turning silver. On one strip of land, tall Friesian cows stand all around us, grazing. Some of them look up as we pass but not one of them moves away.

 Published in 1924, [a:Herman Melville|1624|Herman Melville|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1495029910p2/1624.jpg]'s [b:Billy Budd|831409|Billy Budd|Herman Melville|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1552150211l/831409.SY75.jpg|2764239] was completed in 1891. It was Melville's last work.
 Melville was an American author who wrote great works, but when you read him you can see why many scholars of American literature say [a:Mark Twain|1244|Mark Twain|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1322103868p2/1244.jpg]'s writing marked the beginning of American literature. Melville's prose is deep and ponderous and makes you think of the English writers of that era. Twain's style was open, fresh and, of course, humorous.
 The copy I have has a forward and afterward by James Gunn, a writer known for his science fiction.
 Times have changed since Billy Budd was written and since Gunn wrote about it in this 1988 edition. Gunn describes the key relationship in the novel, that of a superior officer who accuses Billy Budd, a sailor, as one shrouded in mystery. The officer, Claggart, hates Budd enough that he wants to cause his downfall. Gunn says he has no idea why. Simple evil?
 It's obvious reading it now that Claggart is a suppressed homosexual who is enamored of Budd and the times being what they were—the novel takes place in 1797—would be risking ruin if he acted on his desires.
 Melville points to this with what now read as billboards but in his day (and beyond) escaped notice. The novel's title is often rendered as Billy Budd, the Handsome Sailor and Melville describes the beauty of Budd's skin and general looks in a way usually reserved for maidens:

 When Claggart's unobserved glance happened to light on belted Billy rolling along the upper gun deck in the leisure of the second dogwatch, exchanging passing broadsides of fun with other young promenaders in the crowd, that glance would follow the cheerful sea Hyperion with a settled meditative and melancholy expression, his eyes strangely suffused with incipient feverish tears. Then would Claggart look like the man of sorrows. Yes, and sometimes the melancholy expression would have in it a touch of soft yearning, as if Claggart could even have loved Billy but for fate and ban.