That’s my niece Hannah Leming (right) and her friend and traveling companion Catherine Slaton, in a selfie sent from the New Orleans airport. They’re about to board a flight that will end in Brussels, from where they will begin their two-month odyssey around Europe. They’re calling themselves The Wandergals, and here is their travel blog, in case you want to follow their adventures.

They’re leaving today with brand-new Kindles, thanks to the generosity of one of you readers, who asked to remain anonymous. The reader, who lives halfway across the country, called Best Buy, bought the Kindles for the girls, and had them at the store in Baton Rouge for them to pick up. They were both so, so excited by this. Thank you, reader! You’ve made them so happy.

I bought Hannah three Kindle books for her new device — and they weren’t the three books I recommended in Monday’s thread, either. I figured she had a paperback copy of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, so I didn’t get that. So many of your recommended Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time Of Gifts that I started reading it online, and was instantly hooked. I bought that for her on Kindle, and ordered a paperback copy for myself. And I also bought for her Edmund de Waal’s sad, beautiful memoir of his family, The Hare With Amber Eyes. Not only is it a pleasure to read, it’s also a way of telling about the rise and fall of his family, and what history can do to a family, by following the fate of an heirloom art collection. It’s an intimate way to understand the history of Europe in the late 19th to mid-20th century. You can’t really see it on the photo above, but the book Hannah is showing is the de Waal.

I’m so excited for Hannah, who deserves to have two months to be footloose and fancy free. This is a young woman whose mother died three weeks into her first semester of college. Though she had a scholarship to LSU, she got a full-time job to help pay her bills. She worked this job while taking a full semester load, each semester. Hannah kept her grades consistently high — she made the Dean’s List this past semester — and distinguished herself on her job.

She deserves a break. She’s getting one. God bless her, and go with her and Catherine. Thanks again to the generous reader.