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The Books Briefing: Miss the Movies? Read the Books.

Even if you're not going to theaters or streaming on demand, you can still curl up with the original works: Your weekly guide to the best in books
Source: MILLENNIUM IMAGES / GALLERY STOCK

After I became a parent, I created a secret ritual: Once a year, I would take a vacation day from work, tell absolutely no one in my family about it, and go see the latest Marvel blockbuster. In the mostly empty theater, I’d forget about the long hours commuting in standstill traffic, the dark circles that had formed under my eyes after a child woke me up multiple times a night, and all the other mundane sources of suburban exhaustion. The movie theater was my refuge,

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