sundowner at shell house

There has only been one other time when I read an entire book in one day.

That was Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and boy did I have a knot in my stomach after that one. Thomas Hardy can sure make a bad situation MUCH worse. I mean, time sensitive notes going under door mats! He obviously didn't think of me, a procrastinator in my senior year of high school, starting his novel at 8pm and needing to finish it by 4th period the next day. Had he indeed thought of me, that book may well have been several hundred pages shorter.

But that was then.

Just yesterday I took a break from reading A Tale of Two Cities (I'm not too worried. That book seems to lend itself well to small breaks) to read Roald Dahl's Going Solo.

It's the sequel to his first installment of autobiographical stories, Boy, which I read on a on a Thanksgiving extravaganza in 2004, and it is wonderful. So I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw Going Solo sitting untouched on the school shelves where I work. I couldn't resist.

I read the first few pages during silent reading time at school and, well... couldn't keep silent. I was laughing, and pretty hard too. The students were nice to ignore me for the first few minutes... but I was distracting them quite a bit. They let me retell the story I was reading and laughed with me.

I then took it home with me and finished it later that evening. And guess what: no knot in the stomach. I loved it.

So, I'm sharing this with you... go out and get both Boy and Going Solo (don't worry, you can take a break from [insert book you're reading here]) and give them both a read. You'll be glad you did. And then you'll wish you could go to a sundowner in the African evenings and eat brown rice and bananas... seriously, I'm going to try this.

and a new word for me from this book:

benighted
adj.
1. overtaken by darkness or night
2. being in a state of moral or intellectual darkness; unenlightened