I built this for one reader.

My wife reads more than anyone I know, and for years the things she thought while reading went nowhere. A line she loved, said out loud to a room. An argument with a character, lost by the next chapter. A word she meant to look up. I wanted her to have a place where all of that stayed in the book she found it in.

That’s the whole idea. A journal that lives inside the book. Her Kindle highlights landing in the right book with one tap. Nothing to sort, nothing to file.

Building it for one person decided a lot. There’s no feed, because she didn’t ask for one. There are no points. A note you write ahead of a friend is locked until they get there, because the worst thing you can do to a reader is tell them what happens. And every screen has to be plain enough that she never has to ask me how it works.

The clubs came from watching hers: the book, the night, who’s hosting, who’s bringing what, and afterwards the thing one person noticed that nobody else did. Reflections came from wanting to hand her a book with everything I thought in the margins, and have it wait for her chapter by chapter.

The reading companion is named after my father, Rodney. He taught Latin to teenagers and the eighteenth century to university seniors, and his own scholarship was a book of sources — everything a reader needed to meet a text properly, gathered in one place. That is exactly what a good discussion guide is, so that is his job here: prepare the ground, then get out of the way. Meet him

If it’s good for her, it might be good for you. That’s the bet.

— Justin