5/31/2007

Photographed by my sister, Liz Worthy, at Spork, the super uber, super hipster KFC replacement at Valencia and 22nd, where you can eat with a real metal tined spoon imported from Korea.

It was late Thursday night, on our way home from the said photographer's ceramics studio, when we happened to spy someone we met at Ritual's first anniversary prom last year (for the second anniversary they just danced on the counter tops in their underwear), who was reading. We had to stop. I was with a camera'd person (mine was broken).

He was reading Independent People, by the Nobel Prize winning Icelandic author, HalldórLaxness, which had the most amazing reviews. Annie Proulx named it among her top ten favorite books of all time. It's about a sheep farmer named Bjartur, striving for independence.

His favorite author--Jane Austen, for her talent of "winking at you" while she's writing it, like the reader is in on an inside joke with her.

He also loves the Harry Potter books. Each time a new one comes out, he rereads, or rather, relistens, to them all--he has them on his iPod, in the voice of Jim Dale who used to be on Broadway. His opines that the success of the books are due to J.K. Rowling's genre mashing.

Other books he loves listening to are Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, read by Seamus Heaney himself and the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey, read by Ian Mckellan (the British Shakespearean actor who played Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movies.)

It was the very end of the evening and the tables were empty except for the reader, but yet the staff didn't hurry us out so he could pay his bill, and even gave us photography tips....it was too dark to take the up on the no-flash suggestion, though.

Thanks, Liz!

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