Agony: when a character you like suddenly and unexpectedly dies from senseless violence and you almost miss your train stop because you are so engrossed and you put the book away and hurry to work in great distress thinking, “no, it can’t be,” and hoping that you read it wrong or hoping that some miracle will happen or a mistake has been made and the character isn’t really dead but you can’t know for sure until your lunch break and you watch the hands of the clock tick, tick, tick and become absolutely certain that someone is messing with the space-time continuum because the four hours—four hours!—until lunch at noon seem to have taken fourteen hours and you get to the lunch room and there are people in there who want to talk to you—don’t they see your book? Don’t they understand?—and finally, finally, they leave and you open the book and DEATH is approaching your favorite character and you think this can’t be happening and then DEATH is talking to your character and you think it’s all over but then DEATH says that it isn’t your character’s time to go and all the tension you’ve felt since the morning drains away and leaves you almost giddy because he’s ok, he’s ok.