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Hello and welcome to More Happier where we talk about ideas for making us happier.
What's making us happier today is that Read 25 Day is almost here.
I'm thrilled to partner with bookshop .org for Read 25 Day.
We're teaming up as part of the Read 25 in 2025 challenge to host a nationwide gathering on Wednesday, June 25th for a special 25 -minute silent reading experience which then can spark follow -up conversation about books, recommendations, and the joy of reading.
And if you want to join us, there are many ways to participate.
You can find one of over 150 local bookstore events.
You can host your own reading get -together, or you can read for 25 minutes on your own wherever you are.
And all reading counts to participate.
So whether you you dive into a novel, flip through a magazine, power up your e -reader, or do what I always do, which is lose yourself in an audiobook, all forms of reading are welcome.
Pledge to read 25 on June 25th and head to happiercast .com slash read25day to learn more about how you can be part of the biggest reading event of the year.
And hey, you can even bookmark this episode or find another episode of Your Next Listen to participate.
And help get you in the mood for Read 25.
Here are 25 minutes of a book that I love.
I love this book so much. Now my husband, Jamie, is reading it.
It is The Ministry of Time by Kayleigh -Anne Bradley.
Enjoy. Perhaps he'll die this time.
He finds this doesn't worry him.
Maybe because he's so cold, he has a drunkard's grip on his mind.
When thoughts come, they're translucent, free -swimming Medusa.
As the arctic wind bites at his hands and feet, his thoughts slop against his skull.
They'll be the last thing to freeze over.
Her. He knows he is walking, though he can no longer feel it.
The ice in front of him bounces and retreats, so he must be moving forward. He has a gun across his back, a bag across his front.
Their weight is both meaningless and Sisyphean.
He is in a good mood.
If his lips were not beyond sensation, he would whistle.
In the distance, he hears the boom of cannon fire, three in a row, like a sneeze.
The ship is signaling.
Chapter One The interviewer said my name, which made my thoughts clip.
I don't say my name, not even in my head.
She'd said it correctly, which people generally don't.
I'm Adela, she said.
She had an eye patch and blonde hair the same color and texture as Hay.
I'm the vice secretary.
Of? Have a seat. This was my sixth round of interviews.
The job I was interviewing for was an internal posting.
It had been marked security clearance required because it was gauche to use the top secret stamps on paperwork with salary bands.
I'd never been cleared to this security level, hence why no one would tell me what the job was.
As it paid almost triple my current salary, I was happy to taste ignorance.
I'd had to produce squeaky clean grades in first aid, safeguarding vulnerable people, and the Home Office's Life in the UK test to get this far.
I knew that I would be working closely with a refugee or refugees of high interest status and particular needs, but I didn't know from whence they were fleeing.
I'd assumed politically important defectors from Russia or China.
Adela, Vice -Secretary of God knows what, tucked a blonde strand behind her ear with an audible crunch. Your mother was a refugee, wasn't she?
She said, which is a demented way to begin a job interview.
yes mom cambodia she said yes mom i've been asked this question a couple of times over the course of the interview process usually people asked it with an upward lilt expecting me to correct them because no one's from cambodia you don't look cambodian one early clown had said to me then glowed like a pilot light because the interview was being recorded for staff monitoring and training purposes.
He'd get a warning for that one.
People say this to me a lot, and what they mean is, you look like one of the late entering forms of white, Spanish maybe, and also like you're not dragging a genocide around, which is good because that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.
There was no genocide adjacent follow -up.
Any family still there?
Understanding Moe. Do you ever visit?
Sympathetic smile. Beautiful country.
Tarkening with tears.
When I visited, visible on lower lid.
They were so friendly.
Adela just nodded. I wondered if she'd go for the rare fourth option and pronounce the country dirty.
She would never refer to herself as a refugee, or even a former refugee, I added.
it's been quite weird to hear people say that the people you will be working with are also unlikely to use the term we prefer expat in answer to your question i'm the vice secretary of expatriation and they are expats from history history.
Sorry? Adela shrugged.
We have time travel, she said, like someone describing the coffee machine.
Welcome to the ministry.
Anyone who has ever watched a film with time travel, or read a book with time travel, or dissociated on a delayed public transport vehicle considering the concept of time travel, will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit.
How does it work? How can it work?
I exist at the beginning and end of this account simultaneously, which is a kind of time travel, and I'm here to tell you, don't worry about it.
All you need to know is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time, but had not yet experimented with doing it.
In order to avoid the chaos inherent in changing the course of history, if history could be considered a cohesive and singular chronological narrative, another crock of shit, it was agreed that it would be necessary to extract people from historical war zones, natural disasters and epidemics.
These expatriates to the 21st century would have died in their own timelines anyway.
Removing them from the past ought not to impact the future.
No one had any idea what traveling through time might do to the human body.
Though the second reason that it was important to pick people who would have died in their own timelines is that they might well die in hours, like deep -sea fish brought up to the beach. Perhaps there were only so many epochs the human nervous system could stand.
If they got the temporal equivalent of the bends and sluiced into grey and pink jelly in a ministry laboratory, at least it wouldn't be, statistically speaking, murder.
Assuming that the expats survived, that meant they would be people, which is a complicating factor When dealing with refugees, especially en masse, it's better not to think of them as people It messes with the paperwork Nevertheless, when the expats were considered from a human rights perspective, they fit the Home Office criteria for asylum seekers It would be ethically sparse to assess nothing but the physiological effects of time travel To know whether they had truly adjusted to the future, the expats needed to live in it.
Monitored by a full -time companion, which was, it transpired, the job I'd successfully interviewed for.
They called us Bridges, I think because assistant was below our pay grades.
Language has gone on a long walk from the 19th century.
Sensible used to mean sensitive.
Gay Gay used to mean jolly.
Lunatic asylum and asylum seeker both used the same basic meaning of asylum.
An inviolable place of refuge and safety.
We were told we were bringing the expats to safety.
We refused to see the blood and hair on the floor of the madhouse.
I was thrilled to get the job.
I'd plateaued where I was, in the languages department of the Ministry of Defence.
fence. I worked as a translator consultant specialising in Southeast Asia, specifically Cambodia.
I'd learned the languages I translated from at university.
Despite my mother speaking Khmer to us at home, I hadn't retained it through my formative years.
I came to my heritage as a foreigner.
I liked my languages job well enough, but I'd wanted to become a field agent, and after after failing the field exams twice, I was at a bit of a loss for career trajectory.
It wasn't what my parents had had in mind for me.
When I was a very small child, my mother made her ambitions known.
She wanted me to be prime minister.
As prime minister, I would do something about British foreign policy and I would also take my parents to fancy governmental dinners.
I would have a chauffeur.
My mother never learned to drive.
the chauffeur was important.
Regrettably, she also drilled the karmic repercussions of gossip and lying into me.
The fourth Buddhist precept is unambiguous on this, and thus at the age of eight my political career was over before it began.
My younger sister was a far more skilled assembler.
I was dutiful with language and she was evasive, pugnacious with it.
This is why I became a translator and she became a writer, or at least she tried to become a writer and became a copy editor.
I was paid considerably more than her, and my parents understood what my job was, so I would say that karma worked in my favor.
My sister would say something along the lines of, go fuck yourself, but I know she means it in a friendly way, probably.
Even on the very day we were to meet the expats, we were still arguing about the word expat.
If they're refugees, said Semelea, one of the other bridges, then we should call them refugees.
They're not moving to a summer cottage in Provence.
They will not necessarily think of themselves as refugees, said Vice Secretary Adela.
Has anyone asked them what they think?
they see themselves as kidnap victims mostly 1916 thinks he's behind enemy lines 1665 thinks she's dead and they're being released to us today the wellness team think their adjustment will be negatively impacted if they're held on the wards any longer said adela dry as a filing system.
We, or rather Sommelier and Adela, were having this argument in one of the ministry's interminable rooms, pebble -coloured with lights embedded in the ceiling, modular in a way that suggested opening a door would lead to another identical space, and then another, and then another.
Rooms like this are designed to encourage bureaucracy.
This was supposed to be the final direct briefing of the five bridges.
Simelia, Ralph, Ivan, Ed, and me.
We'd all gone through a six -round interview process that put the metaphorical drill to our back teeth and board. Have you now or ever been convicted of or otherwise implicated in any activity that might undermine your security status?
Then nine months of preparation.
The endless working groups and background checks.
The construction of shell jobs in our old departments.
defence, diplomatic, home office.
Now we were here, in a room where the electricity was audible in the lightbulbs, about to make history.
Don't you think, said Sommelier, that throwing them into the world when they think they're in the afterlife or on the Western Front might impede their adjustment?
I ask both as a psychologist and a person with a normal level of empathy.
Adela shrugged. It might, but this country has never accepted expatriates from history before.
They might die of genetic mutations within the year.
Should we expect that?
I asked, alarmed. We don't know what to expect.
That's why you have this job.
The chamber the ministry had prepared for the handover had an air of antique ceremony, harmony.
Wood panels, oil paintings, high ceiling.
It had rather more eclat than the modular rooms. I think someone on the administration team with a sense of drama had arranged the move.
In its style, and in the particular way the windows flattened the sunlight, the room had probably remained unchanged since the 19th century.
My handler, Quentin, was already there.
He looked bilious, which is how excitement shows on some unpeople.
Two agents led my expat through the door at the other end of the room before I'd adjusted to knowing he was coming.
He was pale, drawn.
They'd clipped his hair so short that his curls were flattened.
He turned his head to look around the room, and I saw an imposing nose in profile, like a hothouse flower growing out of his face.
It was strikingly attractive and strikingly large.
He had a kind of resplendent excess of feature that made him look hyper -real.
He stood very straight and eyed my handler.
Something about me had made him look and then look away.
I stepped forward and his eyeline shifted.
Commander Gore? Yes.
I'm your bridge. And now we're going to take a short break.
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And we're back. Graham Gore, commander, Royal Navy, circa 1809 to circa 1847.
Had been in the 21st century for five weeks.
Though, like the other expats, he'd only been lucid for a handful of those days.
The extraction process had merited a fortnight of hospitalization.
Two of the original seven expats had died because of it, and only five remained.
remained he'd been treated for pneumonia for severe frostbite for the early stages of scurvy and two broken toes on which he had been blithely walking lacerations too from a taser he'd shot at two of the team members who'd come to expatriate him and a third was forced to fire he'd attempted to flee the ministry wards three times and had to be sedated after he'd stopped fighting back he'd gone through a ground zero orientation with the psychologists and the Victorianists.
For ease of adjustment, the expats were only given immediate applicable knowledge.
He came to me knowing the basics about the electric grid, the internal combustion engine, and the plumbing system.
He didn't know about the world or cold wars, the sexual liberation of the 1960s, or the war on terror.
They had started by telling him about the dismantling of the British Empire, and it hadn't gone down well.
The Ministry had arranged changed a car to take us to the house.
He knew theoretically about cars, but it was his first time in one.
He stared through the window, pallid with what I assumed was wonder.
If you have any questions, I said, please feel free to ask.
I appreciate that this is a lot to take in.
I am delighted to discover that, even in the future, the English have not lost the art of of ironic understatement, he said without looking at me.
He had a mole on his throat, close to his earlobe.
The only existing daguerreotype of him showed him in 1840s fashion with a high cravat.
I stared at the mole.
This is London, he asked finally.
Yes. How many people live here now?
Now, nearly nine million, he sat back and shut his eyes.
That's far too large a number to be real, he murmured.
I am going to forget that you told me.
The house that the ministry had provided was a late Victorian red brick, originally designed for local workers.
Gore would have seen them built if he'd lived into his 80s.
as it was he was 37 years old and had not experienced crinolines a tale of two cities or the enfranchisement of the working classes he got out of the car and looked up and down the street with the weariness of a man who has traveled across the continent and has yet to find his hotel i hopped out after him i tried to see what he could see he would ask questions about the cars parked on the street, perhaps, or the street lamps.
Do you have keys, he asked, or do doors operate by magic passwords now?
No, I have open sesame, he said darkly to the letterbox.
Inside, I told him I would make tea.
He said he would like, with my permission, to look at the house.
I gave it. He made a swift tour.
He trod firmly, as if he expected resistance.
When he came back to the kitchen diner and leant against the doorjamb, I seized up painfully.
Stage fright, but also the shock of his impossible presence catching up with me.
The more he was there, and he kept on being there, the more I felt like I was elbowing my way out of my body.
A narrative -altering thing was happening to me, that I was experiencing all all over, and I was trying to view myself from the outside to make sense of it.
I chased a teabag to the rim of a mug.
We are to cohabit, he said.
Yes, every expat has a bridge for a year.
We're here to help you adjust to your new life.
He folded his arms and regarded me.
His eyes were hazel, scrawled faintly with green, and thickly lashed.
They were both striking and uncommunicative.
You are an unmarried woman?
He asked. Yes. It's not an improper arrangement in this century.
Once you're deemed able to enter the community, outside of the ministry or to anyone not involved in the project, you should refer to me as your housemate.
housemate he repeated disdainfully what does this word imply that we are two unpartnered people sharing the cost of the rent on a house and are not romantically involved he looked relieved well regardless of the custom i'm not certain it's a decent arrangement he said but if you've allowed nine million people to live here perhaps it's a necessity beside your elbow is a white box with a handle it's a refrigerator a fridge we call it could Could you open the door and take out the milk, please?
He opened the fridge and stared inside.
An icebox, he said, interested.
Pretty much, powered by electricity.
I think electricity has been explained to you.
Yes, I am also aware that the earth revolves around the sun, to save you a little time.
He opened a crisper.
Carrots. still exist then.
Cabbage too. How will I recognize milk?
I'm hoping you will tell me that you still use milk from cows.
We do. Small bottle, top shelf, blue lid.
He hooked his finger into the handle and brought it to me.
Maid's got the day off.
off. No maid. No cook, either.
We do most things for ourselves.
Ah, he said, and paled.
He was introduced to the washing machine, the gas cooker, the radio, the vacuum cleaner.
Here are your maids, he said.
You're not wrong. Ah!
Where are the Thousand League boots?
We don't have those yet.
Invisibility cloak, sun -resistant wings of Icarus?
Likewise. He smiled.
You have enslaved the power of lightning, he said, and you've used it to avoid the tedium of hiring help.
Well, I said, and I launched into a pre -planned speech about class mobility and domestic labor, touching on the minimum wage, the size of an average household, and women in the workforce.
It took a full five minutes of talking, and by the end I'd moved into the same tremulous liquid register I used to use for pleading with my parents for a curfew extension.
When I was was finished, all he said was, a dramatic fall in employment following the first world war.
Ah. Maybe you can explain that to me tomorrow.
This is everything I remember about my earliest hours with him.
We separated and spent the fading day bobbing shyly around one another like clots in a lava lamp.
I was expecting him to have a time travel induced psychotic break, and perhaps chew or fold me with murderous intent mostly he touched things with a compulsive brushing motion i was later to learn was because of permanent nerve damage from frostbite he flushed the toilet 15 times in a row silent as a wind hover while the cistern refilled which could have been wonder or embarrassment at hour two we tried to sit in the same room i looked up when he breathed and sharply through his nose to see him pulling his fingers away from a lightbulb in the lamp.
He retreated to his bedroom for a while, and I went to sit on the back porch. It was a mild spring evening.
Idiot -eyed wood pigeons lumbered across the lawn, belly deep in clover.
Upstairs, I heard a cautious woodwind pollinase strike up, waver, and cease.
A few moments later, his tread in the kitchen.
The pigeons took off, their wings making a noise like swallowed laughter.
after. Did the ministry provide the flute?
He asked the back of my head.
Yes, I told them it might be grounding for you.
Oh, thank you. You knew I played the flute?
A couple of extant letters from you and referring to you mention it.
Did you read the letters that mentioned my mania for arson and my lurid history of backstreet goose wrestling i turned around and stared at him a joke he supplied ah are there going to be a lot of those it depends on how often you spring on me such statements as i have read your personal letters May I join you?
Please. He sat down beside me, keeping a space of about a foot between our bodies.
The neighborhood made its noises, which all sounded like something else.
The wind in the trees sounded like rushing water.
The squirrels chattered like children.
Distant conversation recalled the clatter of pebbles underfoot.
i felt i should have been translating them for him as if he didn't know about trees he was drumming his fingers on the porch i suppose he said carefully that your era has evolved past such tasteless vices as tobacco you arrived about 15 years too late it's going out of fashion i've got some good news for you you though i got up he turned his head so as not to have my bare calves in his eyeline fetched a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from a drawer in the kitchen and came back here something else i got the ministry to lay on cigarettes more or less replaced cigars in the 20th century thank
you i'm sure i will adapt he busied himself with working out how to remove the plastic film which he put carefully away in his pocket, flicking the Zippo and frowning at the warning label.
I stared at the lawn and felt like I was manually operating my lungs.
A few seconds later, he exhaled with obvious relief.
Better? It embarrasses me to convey just how much better.
In my time, well -bred young ladies did not indulge in tobacco, but I know that a great deal has changed.
Hemlines, for example.
Do you smoke? No. He smiled directly into my face for the first time.
His dimples notched his cheeks like a pair of speech marks.
What an interesting tone.
Did you used to smoke?
yes did you stop because all cigarette packets carry this garish warning more or less as i said smoking is very out of fashion now because we've discovered how unhealthy it is damn it could i have one please his dimples and his smile had vanished on dam damn.
I suppose as far as he was concerned, I might as well have said, fuck.
I wondered what was going to happen when I did eventually say fuck, which I did at least five times a day.
Nevertheless, he proffered the packet and then lit my cigarette with anachronistic gallantry.
We smoked in silence for a while.
At some point, he raised a finger to the sky.
what is that that's a plane an airplane to give it its full name it's a well the ship of the sky there are people in there probably around a hundred in that little arrow he watched it squinting along the cigarette rent how high up is it six miles or so i thought so well well you have done something interesting with your enslaved lightning must be flying very fast yes a flight from london to new york takes eight hours.
He coughed suddenly, bringing up a mouthful of smoke.
I want you to stop telling me things for a moment, please, he said.
That's quite enough for today.
He ground the cigarette out on the porch. Eight hours, he murmured.
No tides in the sky, I suppose.
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And we're back. That night, I slept with unpleasant lightness, my brain balanced on unconsciousness like an insect's foot on the meniscus of a pond.
I didn't so much wake up as give up on sleep.
Outside on the landing, there was a huge tongue -shaped shadow stretching from the closed bathroom door to my bedroom.
I put my foot in it, and it went squelch. Commander Gore?
Ah, came a muffled voice from behind the door.
Good morning. The bathroom door swung open, guiltily.
Gore was already fully dressed and sitting on the edge of the bath, smoking.
The bottom of the bath had a low tide mark of cigarette ash and soap scum.
Two cigarettes were crushed out in the soap dish.
As I would discover, this would become his habit, rising early, bathing, ashing in the tub.
He could not be persuaded to sleep in, use the shower, which he disliked and intimated was unhygienic, or ash in the ashtrays I would pointedly leave on the edge of the bath.
He would be embarrassed by the sight of my razor, shave with a cutthroat blade, and insist on separate soaps.
All this was to come.
On that first morning, there was Gore chain -smoking in a bleeding water supply line.
The toilet cistern lay on the floor, gleaming like a slain whale.
A vile smell was seeping up from the floor.
I was trying to see how it worked, he said diffidently.
I see. I fear I may have got carried away.
Gore was an officer from the dusk of the Age of Sail, not an engineer.
I'm sure he knew plenty about ship's rigging But he'd probably never handled an instrument more technologically complex than a sexton Men in their right minds are not usually overcome with a mania for pulling the plumbing apart I suggested he might like to wash his hands at the sink downstairs And I could perhaps call a plumber And we could potentially take a constitutional walk on the nearby heath He gave this due consideration over the stub end of the cigarette yes i would like that he said finally we'll go downstairs and wash our hands first it was clear water he said grinding out the cigarette
his face was averted from mine but i could see the mole in his throat lay on pinkening skin well germs germs Germs?
Hmm. Bacteria. Very, very tiny creatures which live in everything, really.
Only visible through a microscope.
The bad ones spread disease.
Cholera, typhoid, dysentery.
I might as well have named the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit for the look of alarmed amazement that came of Agor's face.
He looked down at his hands, and then slowly extended his arms, holding them away way from his body like a pair of rabid rats.
He took some comfort from the phrase fresh air, at least, once we'd stepped out onto the heath.
He was far more impressed by germ theory than he had been by electricity.
By the time we'd crossed the first of the early morning dog walkers, I was enthusiastically describing the cause of tooth cavities with hand motions.
I don't think it's very polite of you to say there are germs in my mouth there are germs in everyone's mouths speak for yourself there'll be germs on your shoes and under your nails it's just how the world works an aseptic environment is well it's a dead one I won't be participating you don't have a choice i will write a strongly worded letter of complaint we walked a little further the color was starting to return to his cheeks though around his eyes i could see score marks of strain and insomnia when he saw me scrutinizing him he raised his eyebrows and i tried a cautious smile careful he said
your germs are showing well we got croissants and tea from a food truck set up by the children's park these concepts were either familiar to him or explicable from context and we managed our walking breakfast with no further revelation i've been told there are other uh expats he said eventually yes there are five of you who are they please there's a woman from 1665 who was extracted from the great plague of london a man a lieutenant i believe from 1645 battle of naseby he fought back harder even than you there's an army captain 1916 battle of the somme someone from robes pierre's paris Since 1793,
she's got quite the psych profile.
You didn't extract anyone else from the expedition?
No. May I ask why not?
Well, this is an experimental project.
We wanted to pull individuals from across as wide a range of time periods as possible.
And you chose me rather than, say, Captain Fitzjames.
I blinked up at him, surprised.
Yes, we had documentary evidence that you'd left the expedition.
That I'd died? Yes.
How did I die? They didn't say.
You were referred to as the late Commander Gore.
Who are they? Captain Fitzjames, Captain Crozier, co -leading the expedition after the death of Sir John Franklin.
We'd fallen into a languid patrolling step, and he'd gone cool.
Captain Fitzjames spoke very highly of you, I ventured.
A man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers.
That, at last, brought his dimples out.
he wrote his memoirs on his return then gore said amused ah commander gore hmm i think i should could we sit down on that bench over there he pulled up the swing of his step so abruptly that i kicked myself in the ankle trying to stop you are about to tell me something happened to captain fitzjames he said let's sit down here what happened he asked the dimples had gone apparently i did not get them for very long long.
Something happened to everyone.
What do you mean? He asked, a touch impatiently.
The expedition was lost. Lost?
In the Arctic. No one returned.
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Visit YourNextListen .com Copyright 2024 by Cullion Bradley Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio From the audiobook The Ministry of Time by Cullion Bradley Read by George Waitman and Katie Long Published by Simon & Schuster Audio A division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Used with permission from Simon & Schuster Inc.
Your Next Listen is a production of Lemonada Media and Simon & Schuster Audio I'm your host, Jackie Danziger.
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