The Riches of Reading

Life is always better when I am in the middle of a good book.  Right now, I am in the middle of two.

At the library, the other day, I was looking for a book on tape and ran into A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami.  How could I not take this one out with a title like this, a great picture of sheep on the cover, and written by a man that shared my father's birthday.  It is a wild one for sure.  It is a pre-loaded digital audio book which means it is all contained and you just plug your head phones in and listen.  You can't tell how long it is because you don't change disks which is strange.  The unit is small and you can put it in your pocket and walk around.  The head phones I am using are the big ones that look like noise protectors.  I was wearing them the other day when I went down and let the animals out to graze.  The geese, particularly, thought the headphones were strange and let me know.

The animals seem to mostly comment on new things around my head.  A different hat, a hood, sunglasses, head phones.  Oh well.

It is a good book but loaded with details that I think are going to come together at some point and don't quite.  I am glad that I am listening to this one because I don't think I could read all of this detail and yet it adds to the story.  I can't quite see where it is going and, like I said, I don't have a sense of how much of the story is left, so it is certainly an unusual situation.

The other book I am reading is The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea.  It too, is filled with elaborate description, some of which I scan.  This one has many phrases in Spanish which are not translated.  Sometimes, I feel like I am eating lobster and steamed artichokes at one meal, both time consuming but delicious.

I wonder if the sheep would like me to read to them.  Sometimes animals like to be sung to, maybe reading would be the same.  Some warm spring day, I will check it out, but for now, I will sit in my van and be read to by Rupert Degas, as the animals graze the one pasture with grass left, below the driveway,