Most quest-givers in most games want you to go somewhere and come back. Clear the wolves, find the ring, carry the letter to the next village. The quest is the thing they want, and once you've done it they stand on the same spot saying the same line until someone turns the servers off.

When I started, I wrote a lot of those, and I wrote them that way, because that was what the template asked for. Name, location, objective, reward. There was a field for motivation, and it was one line long. I filled it with things like "wants revenge" and "worried about her son," and moved on to the next one.

What I've come to believe, slowly and mostly by getting it wrong, is that the quest is almost never what the person wants. The quest is what they think will get them what they want. A woman asks you to clear the wolves off the north road. Fine, she wants the wolves gone. But what she really wants is for her husband to stop taking the north road home at night, and she can't make him stop, so she's decided the wolves are a problem a stranger can solve and her husband isn't.

That changes how she talks to you. She isn't handing out work. She's asking a stranger for help with something she's a little embarrassed about, and she's a little angry that she has to. She'll overexplain. She'll tell you the wolves are worse this year, which may not be true. When you come back, she'll thank you, and then she'll look past you at the road.

None of that has to be said out loud. Most of it shouldn't be. The player who wants the wolves and the reward gets the wolves and the reward, and nobody slows them down. But the player who stops and listens gets a person. In my experience a lot more players stop than the people who design templates expect.

So I keep a rule now, which I'm allowed to share because it's mine and not the studio's. Before I write a word of dialogue for anyone who hands out a quest, I write down what they'd want if the player never showed up. What they want on an ordinary Tuesday, with nobody watching. If I can't answer that, I don't know them well enough to let them speak.

There's an old man on my desk right now, in a side quest I can't describe, who has spent three weeks of drafts asking players to fetch something for him. On Thursday I finally worked out what he wants. He wants someone to ask him why. The fetching was never the point.

Is there someone in a game you remember for what they wanted, rather than for what they asked you to do?

I read more this year than in any year since college, for reasons nobody needs explained. Some of these I read alone at the kitchen table. A lot of them I read with my mother, three chapters a day, and talked over at seven her time. Here are the ones I'd hand to you, in the order I read them:

• The Galton Case, Ross Macdonald. Jonah told me in the comments last New Year's that this was the one to read after The Chill. He was right. A lost son, a claim of identity, and a detective who keeps finding that the past is closer than anyone admits.
• The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel. The end of the Cromwell books. I read it in March, the week the studio sent us home, and it was a strange comfort to spend those days with someone whose troubles were so much worse than mine.
• Peril at End House, Agatha Christie. The first book my mother and I read together on the phone. She had the murderer by chapter nine.
• Five Little Pigs, Agatha Christie. The second, and better. Five people remember the same afternoon, and none of them quite right.
• Excellent Women, Barbara Pym. Ruth Ann mentioned Pym in the comments here in April, and I'm grateful. A clergyman's daughter in postwar London watches everybody else's lives with a dry eye and a kettle always on. I laughed out loud on the couch at nine in the morning.
• Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell. A plague, a family, a child. I didn't expect to read about an epidemic this year and find it a consolation, but I did.
• In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes. Los Angeles after the war, and the whole book is told from inside the murderer's head. Colder than Chandler and very nearly as good.
• Piranesi, Susanna Clarke. A man lives almost alone in an endless house full of statues, and keeps a careful journal, and is happy. I read it in two sittings in October and haven't stopped thinking about it. Short, strange, kind.
• The Moving Toyshop, Edmund Crispin. Jonah's recommendation, from the comments in October. A poet finds a body in an Oxford toyshop at night, and in the morning the toyshop is a grocery. The silliest good mystery I've ever read, and it fooled me anyway.
• The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman. Four people in a retirement village solve murders. My mother read it at the same time and declared it "nonsense, but the right kind."

And one more I won't name, the one that fooled us both in October. Some of you have guessed. I'm not telling.

If I had to keep only one from this year, it's Piranesi. What's yours?

I finished my cards on Friday night and mailed them yesterday, which is late for me, and in a year when the post office is as far behind as it is, probably too late for some of them. I've made my peace with that. A card that arrives in January still arrives.

The list was longer this year. I keep it in the back of my notebook, and every year I copy it forward and add and cross off. Usually it's about sixty names. This year it was eighty-three. I didn't plan that. It happened one name at a time, through the spring and summer, and when I sat down to copy the list I found it had grown while I wasn't watching.

Some of the new names are people from the letters. The retired mail carrier in Oregon, whose card I chose with care because he will have opinions about the stamp. A woman in Texas who wrote to me last year about her twin and has written every couple of months since. Three former colleagues I hadn't spoken to in years until one of us sent a letter in April. A man from my first job, whose father died in September in the care home he couldn't visit. His card took me the longest. I wrote three versions and sent the shortest.

Some are people I'd see every week in a normal year and haven't seen once since March. Priya. The two writers I sat between for five years. Owen, who has never sent a card in his life, and who will get one anyway, because I am my mother's daughter.

And there are the ones that don't change. My mother's cousins. Kristin and her family, with a separate card for each of the kids, because they're old enough now to notice. My mother herself, who will get hers at the same time she's sending me mine, and who will tell me on the phone that I put the stamp on crooked.

Writing eighty-three cards by hand took four evenings. I didn't mind. This year it felt less like an obligation and more like taking attendance: a way of checking, one name at a time, that everyone I care about is still there. Most of them are. I'm grateful for that in a way I've never been before.

Every Thanksgiving of my life, I've been in Duluth. Even the years I couldn't really afford the flight, even the year I had a fever and slept through the whole thing on my mother's couch, I've been there, at her table: some years with the leaf put in for her cousins and whichever neighbor had nowhere else to go, some years just the two of us. This is the first year I haven't.

We decided in October, my mother and I, though really she decided and told me. She said she wasn't going to have me on a plane and in her house in the middle of all this, and that she'd rather miss one Thanksgiving than all the ones after it. I argued for about a week and lost, which is the usual length.

So today we had it on a screen. I propped my laptop against the fruit bowl at one end of my kitchen table and she propped hers against the gravy boat at the end of hers, and we ate at the same time. Her four o'clock, my two. She made the whole dinner anyway, for one: a small turkey breast, stuffing, the cranberry sauce from the can with the ridges still on it, which is the only kind our family accepts. She said she'd freeze the rest and be eating it until Christmas. I made a chicken, mashed potatoes and the green bean thing, and it was fine, and it wasn't hers.

It was strange, and good, and strange. The sound kept cutting out, so half of what she said arrived a moment after her mouth moved, and we kept talking over each other and stopping and both saying "you go." She showed me the table. She'd set it properly, cloth and good plates and all, just for her. She said it didn't seem right to do it any other way. Then she held her laptop up to the window so I could see the lake, gray and going dark at the bottom of the street, and I could see her reflection in the glass, holding it up, in an empty dining room, and I had to look at my potatoes for a minute.

Afterward we read three chapters, as usual, and argued about the butler.

I'm grateful for a great deal this year, and I know it. I've got work, and I've got my health, and my mother's well, and a lot of people I love are safe. There's a long list of people who can't say that tonight. But I'd like to be in Duluth.

Who did you eat with today, and how far away were they?

The first time a book fooled me properly, I was twelve and it was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. My mother handed it to me off her shelf one rainy Saturday and said, "Tell me who did it before the end." I didn't. I got to the last chapters and the floor went out from under me, and I sat on the stairs with the book open on my knees, furious and delighted in about equal measure, and then I went back to the beginning to find out how she'd done it.

That's the part I want to write about. Not being fooled, exactly, but going back. A good mystery fools you and then lets you see that it was fair all along. Every clue was there. You read past them. When you go back, the sentences you skimmed the first time turn out to have been saying something else, very quietly, the whole way through. Christie didn't lie to me. I just believed what I wanted to believe, and she knew I would.

I've been thinking about this because my mother and I are still reading together on the phone, and last week we finished a book that fooled us both. I won't say which, because some of you might read it. My mother, who had the murderer by chapter nine in April, was not pleased. She said "well" in a way I haven't heard since I was sixteen and came home at two in the morning. Then she said it was very well done. Then she said "well" again.

There's a particular pleasure in it that I can't find anywhere else. It's not like a surprise in a movie, where something jumps out at you. It's more like finding that a room you've lived in for years has a door you never noticed. The world turns out to be slightly bigger than you thought, and you didn't see it because you weren't paying attention. Being shown that, kindly, by someone who was paying attention, is one of the best feelings I know.

It's what I try to do in my own work, when I get to, and it's very hard. The difference between being fooled and being cheated is narrow. If the twist comes from nowhere, the player feels tricked, and they're right to. If it's too obvious, they feel clever for a moment and then bored. The good ones live in between: the player didn't see it coming, and the moment they do, they realize they should have. I've written maybe two quests that land there, out of hundreds. I'm still working out how they did it.

And I'll say this for being fooled: it only works if you trust the person doing it. Christie could fool me because I knew she'd play fair. The writers who don't, you stop reading.

What's the book that fooled you best?