April 20, Sunday afternoon -- Reading Angel Flores

At Mission Creek Coffee shop

Reading Narrativea Hispanoamericana 1816-1981, Historia y Antologia: La Generation de 1939 en Adelante, Mexico, by Angel Flores.

It's a collection of stories about this time period, set in Latin America. Right now he's reading about a guardian of a forest in Mexico who keeps people from chopping down the trees.

His favorite book of all time--Moon Palace, by Paul Auster. He read it about three months ago and it's the first book he's read in English. He picked it up at a second hand bookstore because he was familiar with the author--he'd read him in Spanish, but what made The Moon Palace so good was reading it in the author's original language.

When he was a child he read the classic stuff--Cinderella, Pinocchio, stories that his father would bring home for him and his brothers. They also had a set of illustrated encyclopedias that he liked to read.

Favorite Latin American writers--Julio Cortazar, who wrote Hopscotch and the Mexican author, Juan Rulfo, who wrote a couple of books in the 1950s, but then stopped, claiming that the ideas in his stories were from his uncle, who had since passed away.

If he were to write his own book, it would be about the search of something, and self-discovery.