Don’t let anyone fool you: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is, first and foremost, a scary dystopian novel where talent is stolen and personal victories are stomped on. That makes this book kin to 1984. When I first read it, I found it inspiring, and I although I knew that the author was writing the books as a way to push her theory of Objectivism to the masses, I still enjoyed it as a fast-paced (if you cut the redundant speeches) retro science-fiction story.
It also has a great movie potential. After Angelina Jolie flirted with the project in 2008, and long years of stalled production, Atlas Shrugged: Part I is finally a reality. Here is the trailer, brought to you by the appropriately named The Strike Productions:
How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? Who is John Galt?
The special effects look fantastic, and the decor and exteriors are exactly as I imagined them, but I had not imagined Hank Rearden as Grant Bowler. He recently played an idiot werewolf biker in True Blood, but he sure knows how to clean up nicely.
I am really worried about the future of my beloved book. Peter Mayer, who was the CEO of Penguin Books from 1978 to 1996 and now directs The Overlook Press, recently predicted that in the future, the demand for paper books will diminish, and that will make them more expensive, driving most book lovers to Kindle and Co.
Why is that a “bad thing” ? As far as I understand, when you download a book in your e-reader, there are a bunch of things that you can’t do. Like printing it, to have a safe copy in the house, or lending it to a friend, or bringing it to a book signing.
Harper Collins is Taking Measures to make sure that you cannot read a book more than 26 times before it wastes away and disappears from your machine.
Which brings me to my biggest fear: if an editorial house can have remote access to my e-reader, and erase its content, what will prevent them from deleting books that “are no longer in their catalogue” or from “reviewing” the text? Will they be able to know what I read, how I read it and use that on their Market Research department? What if I want to keep my addiction to seinen manga a dark secret? Reading is a very private activity, but with an Internet connexion it will become a recorded public act.
And what will happen to those Limbo authors, who are not old enough to be in Project Gutenberg but were published a long time ago and have not been so commercially succesful? Will they be part of the e-book lucky published? Or will they disappear in the Sales Bin of a Public Library?
And also: how are you going to teach your children the value of reading if you have to pay for their expensive and breakable gadgets? I was a very, very clumsy child and I still destroy an MP3 every year. Books were great because they commit suicide before I clutched them in my fatty hands. That was one of the reasons I loved them. Paper books are better for children, and I bet that they are also cheaper in the long run.
Not to mention that online self-publishing is sometimes the only outlet that some authors have, and if done right, it has the potential to make them richer faster than traditional publishing, like Amanda Hocking has proved (the keywords here are “if” and “potential”).
John Scalzi made this. Click to jump to his blog.
Still, when given the alternative, I would buy a paperback over an e-book any day. For now, at least. But what if Mr. Penguin’s predictions become true and my beloved format becomes incredibly expensive?
The hook to keep people in the paper loop would be EXTRAS:
As this post suggests, I would want my comparatively expensive paper volume to come with a free e-book copy.
1) A life-long guarantee that your e-book will never, ever, disappear from your computer and that you will be able to download it again, as long as you have the paper volume.
2) Deluxe editions (aka hardcovers) could also include interviews with the author, extra chapters, a “trailer” or excerpts from future books, reference lists, a “how to write like me…”
3) Easter Eggs, like in DVDs. Imagine searching for a keyword in your Kindle when, bam! that keyword unlocks Secret Content, like an author’s doodle, or an illustration, or any of the ideas on point 2.
4) Signing tickets! When you buy a paper book, it could come with a voucher for a signing, that you can either send to the author, or use during his future appearances in book fairs, conventions, book tours… a VIP list for paper-readers. Because I still think that signing a gadget is ridiculous.
5) FAQ interaction! With the paper-book, you also buy the ability to ask questions to your e-reader. For instance when you type “Who killed Boy Staunton, Mr. Davies?”, a Mr. Davies bot could answer you “Finish the book!”.
6) For text books and public libraries; once you purchase the paper book, you get a link to a page where you can excerpt the references for your footnotes; instead of just writing the author, editor, etc. you could link directly to the actual paragraph or chapter that you used to source your paper without fear of stepping into a copyright. It could be expanded into a scholar mini-site where the diligent student keeps all the extracts and references that he has used and can update them if there are new discoveries on his field.
7) For children books: if you REALLY insist on buying other format than paper to brain-to-hand challenged kids, be cool and include a small app with your paper book that addresses the child by her name, making her feel part of the experience. A book-club discussion from your laptop or e-reader, with little prices if they give the right answer.
What would you like to see in the publishing industry as we move to a future where the e-reader dominates the book market? Will you keep buying paper books? (The correct answer is “Yes” )
Reporting directly from Neil Gaiman’s blog: Good Omens, the fagnificent spawn of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, is being adapted for television by Terry Jones (Monty Python) and Gavin Scott (Small Soldiers). The producer will be Rod Brown, who already lead the BBC versions of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather and The Colour of Magic. He did a great job capturing the fantastic and gritty ambientation of Discworld’s characters, and I am sure that this coming in 2013 BBC miniseries will be up to the fan base expectations.
What is so exciting about this book becoming a movie? Well, not only is the product of the collaboration of the two most original fantasy writers alive, but it also packs a lot of action, philosophy, absurd, irony, mythology, religion and pop culture references. Let me introduce you the characters and the plot (Pictures by the fantastic jdillon82 at Deviantart). If you want, you can play with me and try to guess which actor will play who.
I hope that after reading those excerpts, you are as excited as I am.
Long live the Gaiman and Pratchett marriage!
Terry Pratchett (left) and Neil Gaiman (right) toasting Good Omens
You don’t need any of these items to enjoy a good read, but they are perfect for the literary worm lifestyle and worth a look. Click on the images to surf to the sellers.
The white pages of that book might hurt your eyes when the sun shines as much as today; don’t forget your sunglasses!
Set the adventure mood with this t-shirt.
But pack a sweatshirt just in case it gets chilly.
A rough and solid leather bag will help you carry your literary prey home.
And these tailored, hand-painted wide-leg pants are perfect for climbing ladders in cluttered bookshops to reach those rare volumes; curl up later in a couch to read them from cover to cover.
Don these eco-friendly and super-comfy flats for long hours of book hunting.
Beth Lisick is a hottie hippie super-smart Frisco based stand-up comedian and poet. I saw her performing live during last summer’s Shakespeare & Cobiannual literary festival where she presented Porchlight Storytelling Series. I don’t remember the stories, only that I left with a big silly smile that lasted until I fell asleep that night.
Everybody into the pool is just like that. Each short memoir is insightful, hilarious and open. Beth Lisick describes her Dad, ruling with an iron spreadsheet,
Dad presented us with a typed agenda. Even at ages four, five and six, my brothers and I knew there was something odd about your dad handing you a memo. We had long harbored a vague suspicion that he thought of us as his employees, and the itemized schedule was a disturbing development.
Her Mom, the loveliest woman in the planet,
Some people get criticized for saying whatever pops into their heads because their heads are full of darkness, sarcasm, and brutal truths. With my mom, it’s the opposite. Her world is full of neat people! Interesting places! Fun ideas! And she’s not afraid to let her little light shine. Irony, for her, was what she had to do with all those clothes in the basket over there, and jaded was a pretty, green Oriental stone.
Her immortal beauty tips:
This hair made perfect sense on me. If anyone cared, it announced that I was the kind of person who would commit any fashion crime that would make me fifty dollars richer.
She also likes to dress up as a banana to make ends meet instead of Starving for her Art.
I can’t remember why I thought that a pseudonym was a good idea (something vague about anonymity), but I quickly discovered if you are nobody, and you are writing as a different nobody and on top of that you are writing for the Internet, it is really, really hard to get into shows free.
Her future husband, Eli:
His brand of dorkiness was like nothing I’d ever seen before, combining an admirable lack of self-consciousness with the showmanship of an enthusiastic, although substandard, theater student. And then later, when I found out that he was nearly legally blind without the thick horn-rimmed glasses that had belonged to his Grandfather Gus, that was it. I was smitten.
The neighborhood where she voluntarily purchases her home:
How bad was too bad? I had grown so accustomed to a certain level of chaos that the usual warning signs didn’t stand out to me. When I pulled my car around the corner to find the cops had blocked off the street, I thought, “Cool, this house is in a neighborhood where the cops will come!” When I saw that the corner store was a magnet for teenage boys all dressed in the same clothing with the same hairstyle, I thought, “This is doable because, statistically speaking, gang members mostly just kill other gang members.”
And, in the last memoir, her clumsy attempts at being a good mother for her newborn son. Which I’m not posting that here, because really, you should buy the book to read all those wonderful and gritty true paragraphs about baby-rearing for yourself.
My favorite piece was Nuns in Trouble. It starts with Beth working her ass off at a bakery shop (and enjoying it immensely) as she discovered that she is pregnant, tips off her college boyfriend and finds a really weird one-stand job to pay for her abortion. This topic would have been difficult for any author, but Lisick is a practical girl who doesn’t mind working for nuns that dress their employers as slutty cigarette girls to sell fancy Christmas trees.
As a bonus, here’s a video of Beth Lisick talking about cheating and being cheated on in relationships.
This book was shelved under Fantasy and Science Fiction at Shakespeare and Company. I bought it for two reasons:
I believed that it was going to be Fantasy (just look at that cover and its promises!)
It was a complete trilogy. In this world of George R.R. Martins, what can be better than to have a complete story in one practical soft-cover volume between your hands? There was no summary, so I didn’t know how to expect at all, although I was hoping for Mythological Beasts and Madness.
I got some Madness and lots of fun. Robertson Davies was a big fan of Jungian psychology, so if you enjoy archetypes in literature this will be a true character identification feast. How each narrator perceives the world around them plays also a big part in solving the Mysterious Death that drives the plot, so you get to play the shrink-detective.
The Best:
The dialogue. Except when Magnus rambles, where it gets a bit stiff.
The female characters (except for Leola Cruikshanks and Doctor Jo) and the fact the sexiest woman in the trilogy is also the ugliest. Liesl Naegeli, I have a crush on you.
The personalities presented, which cover the range of human experience, from the lowest emotions to the best impulses.
The undercurrent of magical realism, which is subtle but sets the novel on fire from the inside.
Liesl Naegeli’s monstruosly romantic castle in Switzerland.
Paul Dempster’s metamorphosis into Magnus Eisengrim.
The Worst:
Boy Staunton’s appalling comments and opinions on everything, from women to religion to child rearing to friendship.
Boy Staunton’s wives.
Boy Staunton’s (and later David Staunton’s) housekeeper. What a detestable woman!
Willard the Pedophile Wizard and his freak show colleagues.
Fifth Business
I love how the cover looks like a tarot card. Those two are Dunny and Boy, acting as each other’s Shadow archetype.
The first book opens with a picturesque scene. The village brat, Percy Boyd Staunton, throws a snowball at his frenemy Dunstable Ramsay, but he misses his target and hits the very pregnant reverend’s wife. Percy the Spoiled Brat flees the crime scene as Mrs. Dempster goes into early labor, delivers a sickly baby and loses her reason. Dunny stays, feeling very guilty about the affair, and he carries that load (which seems unjustified until the last twist of the novel) through his whole life.
I picture Brat Staunton like this. Thanks, Gettyimages.
During this novel, we read about Dunny’s life as a History teacher and Boy Staunton’s rise in the business world (Boy is Percy, who as a good brat adopts a stage name) until the very mysterious death of the later. The question “Who killed Boy Staunton?” is just as haunting and plot-heavy as “Who is John Galt?” in Atlas Shrugged.
The story is told from Dunstable’s point of view, but although he is a charming and convincing old man he is also a very unreliable narrator. He is carefully written, though, so do not get carried away on his rants because they might have little to do with what is actually happening in the plot and what the other characters are perceiving (as you will see in later novels).
Favorite character: The very patient headmaster that to whom Dunny writes to justify his early retirement. That was a 250 pages resignation letter.
The Manticore
This is Boy's son, a criminal lawyer that is not at all like his father, and the most reliable narrator. Cool dude.
After Boy Staunton’s death, his son David decides to travel to Zurich to start a psychiatric treatment. He hasn’t been feeling son hot since his father died, and he has a lot of personal demons inside. Through his sessions with Doctor Jo we learn a lot about his family life, his father’s personality (my opinion of Boy’s bratness doesn’t change a bit) and the women that surrounded his life, and also touched Ramsay’s. Although he is supposed to be mentally ill, his narration is the most reliable of the entire trilogy, so keep your eyes open for clues on who killed David’s father!
Everybody that knew Boy wanted to kill him.
Favorite character: Caroline Staunton, Boy’s favorite child. She is a bitch, but a very smart and funny one, who marries a normal man for love and stands by her family. Her commentaries bring spice and humor, even when they appear through his poor brother’s eyes.
World of Wonders
A magician. Jungian archetype: The Magician. This was an easy one.
Do you remember that Village Brat hit a pregnant woman on the head with a snowball at the beginning of the series? Well, 60 years have passed and her sick little early baby has become a world-renowned illusionist so important that he has been cast as Robert-Houdin in a BBC production. With the excuse of providing a subtext to the director (who goes by Lind, but he is really Ingmar Bergman and everybody knows it), he bribes the film crew with food and tell them his grossly detailed autobiography.
Like this, but without a pretty and scantily clad girl. You get a Newborn Christian Fat Lady and a Liesl.
If you are a fan of circus freaks, village fairs, stage artists, automatons, magic and the jazz age this will be your favorite book, hands down. It is also the toughest and darkest of the three, because Magnus Eisengrim’s road is more a sinister path through the woods sprinkled with wolves and bears. But, if you are good, you will learn what happened to Boy Staunton.
Favorite character: It is a tough call between Liesl Naegeli, Magnus’ financial partner, and Milady. Liesl is wilder and more realistic, but Milady is a lovely old loony.
On Saturday I decided to go to the Salon du Livre in Paris. I should have planned it better. In their website they say that if you are a journalist or a blogger (or retired, or under 26, or a teacher, or a Paris Library member…) you are entitled to a free entrance. All they ask you for is a reference. I thought that, being the webmaster of this page and telling them to check up the address to see that I indeed wrote all these wonderful articles would be enough, but no – the lady at the Press Office wanted “une attestation employeur”, a letter from my employer stating that I wrote for a blog. To read this pointless conversation, click at the bottom of this post.
The Salon was divided in, roughly, five zones: comics and manga, children’s books, e-books, French publishers and international stands (Argentina, Nordic countries, Lebanon, Hungary and Poland were among them). The only book in English that I found was a fake guide to Beirut, but there was a stand with Chinese comic artists. The reference publishers (Art, History, Press, Religion, Linguistics…) were scattered all over the place and nobody showed them love.
Le bleu est une couleur chaude, by Julie Maroh
I immediately gravitated towards the comics and manga zone. In Spain, there would have been two old men in the comics section and a couple of twenty-to-thirty somethings perusing the mangas. Comics and manga are a very small subculture in Spain. In France, however, they consider comic an art form AND they have the best Japanese translators, so I wasn’t surprised when I had to elbow some ribs to get to the New Arrivals shelves. There were many reprints of Manara, a whole stand with the Angouleme winner Le bleu est une couleur chaude (“Blue is a warm colour”), by Julie Maroh and lots of wine-related manga.
His job consists in telling people that they will be dead in 24 hours.
Motoro Mase, the creator of Ikigami, a very dark seinen manga based in a dystopian future very influenced by Death Note, was doing a round table that would be followed by a signing. Seinen is a subset of manga aimed at an adult male audience, but he was answering questions to a crowd composed of 13-year-old girls that were looking at him like he was Robert Pattinson. I hope he gets to stay in Europe for a while, at least until the situation in Japan clears a bit.
The international section was a little poor because there were only a handful of countries. There was a big Congo stand, one for Lebanon, another for Switzerland, the Nordic countries (who were the stars of this Salon’s edition, along with Buenos Aires), Hungary and Poland. The Nordics had a lot of thrillers on display and a whole stage for them. Henning Mankell attended yesterday.
I rushed through the electronic book section, because I find them creepy and still in their development stage, and I found the Brepol Publishers booth. If you ever need to research Medieval History and mores, they have some of the best sources. They are also incredibly expensive; their pocket-sized Bible dictionary costed a whopping €68. Also, they don’t do “translations”. When I asked the manager, who looked like John Malkovich, he told me that the people who research their very specialized subjects speak two or three languages, so they never had a real demand for translations. Still, the papers they publish (on Medieval food… yummy!) are super interesting and worth a look.
Next to Brepol there was the only non-book seller of the fair, Jardin d’Ecrivains, a company that sells scented candles with writer-inspired scents. They don’t have a website, and at €29 for a 6-hour candle they were also on the pricey side, but their candles smelled really good. My favorite was Blixen‘s (Isak Dinesen’s real name, the author of Out of Africa), which had sniffs of lemon and incense and mud.
In all, it was a very good morning. When I left the children and teenagers that had come to visit the Salon with their schools were having lunch on the floor, and I was getting very hungry. I clutched my bag, headed for the Exit (where “toute sortie est definitive”), dodged the cloud of smoke floating over the Real Press delegates, and descended into the Metro, where I immediately cracked open the first of my morning purchases.
Being a bit of an online hermit, this piece of Orson Scott Card’s mind has slipped my eyes for seven years. I am surprised, because in his science-fiction sagas, which I still have to recommend to any science-fiction reader out there, he always came along as a subtle and tolerant, if religious, author.
This essay is apparently part of a series of many others in which he attacks gay marriage for the following reasons, in order of appearance (click on More… to read selected paragraphs)
Orson Scott Card and his Ender's Game
Everything he says and stands for sounds so horribly intolerant, unresearched and stupid that my first instinct was to look for the punchline. It manages to rave against homosexuals, divorced parents and single-parent homes while offending the intelligence of children and trying to manipulate it for his own beliefs, insulting all the people who decide not to reproduce and attacking public education. It is amazingly close-minded and bitter, but indeed this author that advocates for intergalactic tolerance of extremely weird species wrote it, and he takes himself pretty seriously because he has repeated the same discourse over and over again.
I feel a little cheated. It is one thing to read In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust and think that his narrator, protagonist and stand-in character is very self-centered, and then discover that he spent years in bed just because – I wasn’t very surprised. But Orson? You have just broken my literary heart. I don’t think that I will ever buy any other book by you, and I really wanted to read the Alvin Maker series, only because I would be afraid that you would use the income to somehow support those groups that call themselves pro-Family but are really anti-gay and anti-abortion and anti-individual-freedom in general (unless that individual happens to believe in gun possession and the marriage of Church and State). Sigh.
This core belief of mine has a big and bothering loophole.
That is the risk of researching the authors that you like. I was much happier, and less judgemental, when I was a child and I believed that books magically produced themselves and that the author’s name was really just an accessory (which makes sense, because I was a die-hard fan of Goosebumps and the Sweet Valley Twins at that time). Now, as an adult, I find it difficult to divorce the person that wrote the book from the message that he or she is trying to get across, and these messages are usually very easy to detect and discard or think about, depending on my personal beliefs. A good example would be Barbara Kingsolver, who deserves a whole series of articles for herself, or Stephenie Meyer, who is also a very obvious writer.
But Orson deceived me completely. Maybe I was blind with love. This article sums up the core of my problem with the author previously known as my favorite.
What do you do when you find out unpleasant facts about authors that you adore? Does it change your perception of their work, or does your love for their books stay the same?
Walking the Tree, by Kaaron Warren, and Veracity, by Laura Bynum, are two dystopian science-fiction novels that have the same start-point: half the world’s population has been killed by a horrible epidemic, and the survivors have created a radically different society to prevent this from happening again. Also, the main and secondary characters are women.
That’s where the similarities end.
Veracity, by Laura Bynum
Veracity picks up right after the Pandemic, and follows the life of Harper Adams, who was six years old at the time and was a pretty special kid – she could see auras. This gift is greatly coveted in her world, and as soon as she finishes high school she is recruited to become a Sentient Monitor, a special surveyor of all the atrocities that the Blue Coats, the police enforcement body, commit in the name of order. Harper Adams is Special with a big capital S from the beginning, and she knows it, and she resents it in a very broody way. In her world, the Confederation of the Willing, every word is monitored by an implant that twirls around the carotid artery, and speaking a Red Listed word gets you immediate punishment and possibly a complimentary rape courtesy of the Blue Coats. Harper’s job is to make sure that the punished are really guilty and not, for instance, an infant learning to speak and uttering random syllables. Then her best friend gets killed in their office and her daughter’s name, Veracity, gets Red Listed, and Harper finally blows a fuse and decides to become part of the resistance. The story is told in first person from her point of view, which is very broody, and the plot is extremely reminiscent of 1984 – it could be an upgraded version, with the sentient powers and the improved technology.
Walking the Tree, by Kaaron Warren
Walking the Tree, on the other hand, starts so far from the epidemic that it could be read as a fantasy book. It is also told from the point of view of Lillah, the main character, but the style is colder, almost like the script of an ethnology documentary. Lillah lives in one of the many Bronze-age settlements around the Tree, a monstrous baobab that takes up most of a huge island. She is off-age, so she will walk around the tree for the second and last time in her life, in the company of other girls her age and the village children. Along the way, the children will learn about the different ways and the girls will, hopefully, find a village that pleases them enough to settle and create a family of their own. Opposite to Harper, Lillah is not special – she is pretty, but not the prettiest, smart but not the cleverest, and angry but not, by far, the craziest of her companions. Before leaving, though, a dying woman charges her with caring for her only son, who might or might not be a carrier of the illness that killed everyone once upon a time. In this idyllic setting, any person suspected of sickness is killed on sight, so what Lillah is doing by undertaking this mission is risking the life of her whole group. Still, she goes ahead, hoping for the best and eager to learn.
Why did I pitch these books against each other? Probably because I read them one after the other, both protagonists are tough ladies and because both of them sprung from the idea of a mysterious illness wiping most of the humanity from the face of the Earth. It proposes two plausible futures: one where restrictions and a totalitarian state become the answer, but which keeps the technological advances and offers an alternative to recover what we know, the resistance, and another one, where the human race has lost everything it had and is back at its learning stage, dealing with their differences in a nature-friendly way. The last one seems more appealing, but it is so alien that I think that most people would choose the Confederation of the Willing horrors over the Tree-hugger technology-free world.
Yesterday, my dog got very, very sick. So sick, in fact, that I decided to call the veterinary delivery service instead of waiting until my boyfriend got home to drive him to the clinic.
By the time he arrived with his gigantic backpack filled with all kinds of medicine magic, Dog was shaking and crying and I was ready to pay anything to make him feel better. Vet probably noticed that I was in a Very Bad Vibes mood and tried, while he run all kinds of invasive tests on Dog. So he told me that he was from Alsace (and that he approved of the European Union because it had put an end to all the local malaises regarding nationalism), that he had known my usual vet since they were tadpoles and that his wife was a translator.
“That is very cool,” I said while he introduced a thin plastic tube in Dog’s unmentionables, and most disturbing of all, Dog didn’t even whimper. “What does she translate?”
“Oh, you know, thrillers… (although he used the word “polars“)
“Which kind?” I was expecting Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay, a series about an ethical serial killer with gory non-descriptions, maybe because it fitted Dog’s horrid state, but he surprised me.
I have only started to read the second series of McCall Smith’s murder mysteries. The first novel is titled The Sunday Philosophy Club, and it follows the Murder She Wrote structure almost to a T (well-off spinster that a man flying headfirst to his death at the end of a concert and decides to find out what happened to him)… only he introduces a lot of self-reflection on the morality of getting involved in other’s affairs, and it is tinted with a blue-grey melancholic hue that suits the setting of the novel in Edinburgh. Not a thriller, by any means, and it is closer to Miss Smila’s Feeling for Snow than to Dexterworld.
He smiled and patted Dog on the back, and a while later left, leaving us with lots of pills and syrups and needle-free syringes to force-water feed him, and the advice to drive Dog to the clinic that same afternoon if his condition did not improve.
His condition did not improve. And I had to leave him at the clinic for the night.
It is the first time that I have been separated from him in five years. I was (still am) worried sick. BF put his arm around me, kissed me on the front and led me to the car as I imagined the cries of Dog all alone in the vet’s waiting room.Then my cellphone rang.
“Hello, I am Alsatian Vet. I saw Yaco this morning. I was just wondering how he was,”
“He is… he had to get hospitalized. For the night. We are leaving the clinic now. They will know more tomorrow afternoon,” I couldn’t control my sky-high voice pitch. It was embarrassing. I wanted to hang up. “Thank you very much for your help this morning…”
“That was no problem at all. Thank you for the sandwich,” I had made him a hot-omelette sandwich for the way, because it was lunchtime and he was off to heal another animal and he wouldn’t have the time to eat, but most of all because I needed something to do with my hands while he treated Dog. “It was delicious. Tell you what, I will send you one of the books my wife translated,”
He was still trying to cheer me up. I sniffed. “That is very kind of you… But I read them in English,”
“Yes, but that way you will be able to see the differences, it might be fun,”
“Yes…”
“Take care, little one,”
And he hung up.
I don’t know what the moral of this story is. What I know, however, is that I will always associate McCall Smith with Dog’s sad brown eyes as I left him there. And maybe, fingers crossed, with his recovery.
I am crossing my fingers so hard they are becoming hooks.
)
