At the end of summer there is usually one week when the evenings are still warm enough to sit outside with a book. I plan for it the way other people plan a trip: a stack of books on a small table, a chair turned towards the light, an evening kept clear.
And every year I read almost nothing. The light changes, a neighbour waters their plants, the street below does whatever streets do at seven o’clock, and the book stays open at the same page for an hour.1
1 This is not a complaint. An hour with a book open and unread is not the same as an hour without one.
The stack is the point
I have stopped counting pages in that week. The stack is a kind of permission: evidence that the evening is for reading, even if the reading turns out to be mostly looking. By the fourth evening it is too cold, and the books go back inside, most of them unopened, all of them somehow part of it.