December 26, 2007 -- Wednesday evening

Reading The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai.

Her favorite book--Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë.

Recently, she read--so recently that it was still in her bag--Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, which she enjoyed. This book was also highly recommended to me by bookseller Paul Klindt, who showed me around The Dalles, Oregon this summer, during my tour of the U.S. Here's a link to my tour of The Dalles and Mr. Klindt's other recommendations, too....I don't know why I'm adding this here. I'm just feeling nostalgic.

When she was a child she read books in Spanish, sent by relatives in Chile. She grew up in a Spanish speaking family in Huntington Beach, California, and it was, at that time, difficult to find books for children written in Spanish.

As an adult she is bilingual and still reads in Spanish. Though she read Shadow of the Wind, which is by a Spanish author, and is the most successful Spanish novel since Don Quixote, in English, she reads Chilean author Isabelle Allende in Spanish and, recently, The Crime of Padre Amaro, by Jose Maria Eca De Queiros and Margaret Jull Costa, in Spanish as well.

She reads all the time and everything. Sometimes, she said that's a problem. She bought a book once on the basis of the cover alone. Usually she knows better. The book had no point, but despite this, she kept on reading. She read the whole five-hundred-something pages. Books about nothing, she said, shouldn't be allowed to be that long.

0 Comments: