The man eating alone at the next table was an oncology professor and bibliophile who had precisely 1,000 books in his collection; whenever he wished to add a new one, he ritually burned an old one. Ariel was happy to see that he had surprised me with this revelation. We went down to the music salon as he rattled off the eccentrics who collect books with exactly 200 or 300 pages, or whose protagonists' names all start with "A," or whose narrators turn out to be the murderers in the end. I felt sorry for the authors of those books.