The Constant Reader

A couple of weeks ago I was tooling around Amazon and I found a few titles I thought I needed.

So I stepped back. I was all ready reading something and I do most of my reading over lunch and when you take into account the drive to the food, ordering the food, eating the food - there just isn’t a lot of time left over to actually read anything.. Yeah, I can sit in the car back in the parking lot, but it’s winter time now and it’s cold and not all titles are the page turners that Salt was. I mean, sometimes it can take me a month to finish a book. It is to weep.

I could bring the books inside with me at the end of the day but then I would either finish them too fast or I will forget to take them back out with me in the morning and then I would have nothing to read over lunch at all and that would be terrible.

Okay. So I ordered “some” books. Three. Used. Thank you very much. And then I waited.

And in the fullness of time they began to arrive. First one then another and then the last. I can find two of them. I am almost positive that they all got here. So, where is book number one? I would almost swear that it made it into the house. I can kind of almost remember looking at it, or the cover or something. I know there is an orange pitcher on the front cover. Or I saw the cover online and... I’ve looked for it. I went through the car because I might have decided that it would be the next book so I should just leave it in the car... but, why isn’t it in the car now? There were two books in the car, the book I read after I finished book “A” and the book I started when I finished book “B”. I was just about getting ready to take book “B” out of the car. In my defense, it had been moved to the passenger side floor board. It was really hardly even in the car anymore. Removing it bodily was almost over kill.

I had all ready cleaned out the car. I left Dogger unsupervised in Minnie for a couple of hours and before I did that, I took out everything I thought Dogger might want to play with - and I don’t remember finding the missing book. Dogger hasn’t chewed a book yet - I would like to say it is because she is such a well behave Dog or that even, she just knows not to destroy the written word. Right. Books are just too much work to chew up and Dogger is not really into hard work. The Kitty, on the other hand would go through a library.

The good news is, that while I was searching for The Book, I ran across some other books I had forgotten about. I did a lot of buying at that book fair last fall and not all of them were for Tiny E, The Gulag Arcapeligo is a book I should have read a long time ago. A person who has read as much Martin Cruz Smith as I have, should really read the real thing.