blog along li'l dogie

I've told you before  that I'm not to be trusted with books, especially one that wraps itself around my hippocampus and won't let me go. I'm trying very hard to be disciplined with this one because it's very long and I have things to do.  Last night I actually set the timer on me so that I would quit and go to bed at a decent hour.  You think that's discipline; it's not, it's self-protection. I managed to swim this morning after a perfectly timed sleep, thanks to my timer. But I made the mistake of reading at breakfast and now it's time to go about the day, and no blog.

I'll tell you, the book is so good.  I will never in a million years write as well as this author.  And she knows so much.  I have always known myself to be short of a working knowledge of say, a car engine, or of astronomy, or plants. I think of the American humorist, Robert Benchley (1889-1945), who said he knew two things in nature: a robin and a rose.  That's me, abysmally ignorant.  I know a bit about cooking, something about Grimm's Language Laws, and I can recite the first book of Madeline ("In an old house in Paris/All covered with vines...."), but not much else.  This person whose book, one of the best hundred and also one of the best ten published last year in the U.S., this person is astonishing. I recommend Donna Tartt's THE GOLDFINCH. It's up for the Bailey's (formerly the Orange) Prize for Women's Literature, winner to be announced in April. I'll have time to re-read it before then.