FOR SEVERAL YEARS, as my wife and I explored living in cities other than New York, I copyedited books for Penguin Random House. Many of them were thrillers and romance novels that, oddly, involved reclusive men with scars on their faces. The most-recent book I worked on was Abbi Waxman’s The Garden of Small Beginnings. It has a rating of 4.5 stars on Amazon, but so do a lot of books that I had nothing to do with.