Out of the way

In the last chapter, we had left our protagonist with a big fat bus-stop novel in hs hands, a spanish translation running to about 1000 pages (or half a cent per page).

Book number 15 took a while. I read "El Médico" ('The Doctor' by Noah Gordon) from start to finish, before I even began another. It's an historical novel. When I had finished it I was talking about it at dinner with old friends. It's about a poor orphan in tenth-century London, who somehow gets a dopted by a barber-surgeon as an apprentice, and dreams of being a real doctor learning at a university. Amazingly enough, everything happens like in a story...

... and when I turned to the person next to me and said "you would probably enjoy it, except it is in Spanish" she said "Oh. I read that years ago, and didn't think it was your cup of tea". (As I write this the kettle is coming to a boil, so a quick pause to make the tea).

16, a book I won - "The Ginger Man" by JP Donleavy. (Another that this friend had read, as it turns out, many more years ago). I didn't like it so much. A book set in post-war Ireland and England, with protagonists that remind me of many things I don't find admirable in myself, exaggerated to make them seem truly horrible. And the redeeming features, in the end, are so repressed for most of the story as not, ultimately, to redeem it. Nasty people living nasty lives, in a depressingly small world.

"The Shiralee" by D'Arcy Niland followed it, somewhat as night follows day. More or less in one trip I read it through. A known classic, it is about the great world that is country Australia of the 1950s (although a lot of the setting is only incidentally rooted in any given time), about wanderlust, and love, desire, and a different approach to the struggle for a life to that of the Ginger Man. If the protagonist had the serious flaws of a real hero, he also had a character A book I enjoyed, and so passed on to a friend - he has never been to Australia, but has seen interesting parts of the world. I hope he appreciates it as I did.

While in his house, late last night, at the long late end of a long late birthday party, I picked a book off the shelf - "Me Talk Pretty Someday". It is by an author called David Serdaris. 250 pages of funny and easy to read autobiographical stories, and some stories about stories (something that, well told, I love). I sat on the train today finishing the book, laughing out loud, which must have disturbed the other passengers a little. I apologise, folks. It was worth it.

In the meantime I began what I thought would be book 17 - maybe it will be the 18th. "Manual do Guerreiro da Luz" by Paulo Coelho. Paul the Rabbit is famous, but I bought this book in an airport because his name is Portuguese. I think I was in brazil, but I don't recall. In my campaign to actually read the books I have bought then abandoned or never opened, this got taken from the shelf for this trip. It's not the easiest thing to read, since I never claim that I speak portuguese, although I find I can read it reasonably comfortably. Maybe another few books and I will have a better chance of actually using teh language myself enough to learn it. We'll see.