I tend to lose track of initial articles because I did library training at a point when stripping those off was pretty much automatic. Unless I have the book in front of me and can see that the article's not there, I tend to assume it is if it would sound right that way.

My daughter will complain that she has 'nothing to read.' I then point out that we own about four thousand books, and she looks at me and says, "Yes, but they're all boring and terrible." And then I try very hard not to bang my head on something because, of course, I kept all of those books because they were terrible. I only keep terrible books.