Books at will

My innate sense of timing was shown yet again in my second-perfect departure from the pool exactly at the time that the kids walked through the door to start their lesson!  You’ve either got it or you haven’t!

Today was warm enough to allow me to lie out on the Third Floor for an acceptable period of time – which was just as well as we appear to be in for an extended period of cloud cover and worse.  By the weekend I will be seething if I have not had my MSQ (minimum sun quotient) but I have to admit it is a rare day indeed in this part of the world if you get an entire day without at least a gleam of sunshine.  So I shouldn’t complain.  But I do.

I have been told by old hands who have been in the country for years that eventually you get “fed up” (their words) with sunshine and actively seek to avoid it.  I have taken this as hysteria on their part as I have seen not a jot of diminution of heliocentric behaviour on my part!

I am now well into the book which I bought because I could.  That is one of the real dangers of a Kindle.  Reading through the Guardian on the device and listening to the very literate fellow travellers who write in the august organ, it is very tempting to take a critic at his or her word and instantly find the book recomm3ended in the Kindle store and, before you know it some automatic system of your hand has kicked in and you’ve bought it.

My almost latest purchase (once you’ve started buying the temptation is to continue!) is a book called “The Islands” by an Argentinian Carlos Gamerro which has recently been translated from Spanish into English.

The novel uses the Falkland Islands, or more properly Las Malvinas from the Argentine point of view, and their loss as a symbol for a sort of critique of Argentine society.  The action of the novel is extraordinary and has a true hallucinatory quality.  I am gripped by it and am slightly forsaking the reading of the True Newspaper to give more time to it.

I have decided that I have not done enough intense reading throughout the summer – if I don’t get back into the habit I am going to lose the skill.  Ho!  Ho!