Readers are thieves. We break into books. We burgle them. We see what we want and we make off with it. This is ok. We’re burglars, it’s what we do. Sometimes there’s nothing in there we fancy. Sometimes we don’t notice the really valuable stuff. We fixate on the flat screen TV and miss the original Hockney hanging on the wall. We’re in and out. There are a lot of houses to burgle. And we know that many of them are packed with treasure. So we dash in and dash about, and we knock things over and spill drawers on the floor, and we forget that this is somewhere somebody has lived. For months or years. A writer has lived in here. Meticulously placing the coffee table in exactly the right place, carefully arranging the figurines on the mantelpiece. And what if, while we’re rifling through the kitchen cupboards he should suddenly return home? We freeze. We look around. We pick up the poker from the fireplace and we wait behind the door and we cave in his head.