Finally, this vacation is ending. Don’t get me wrong, these were three weeks in paradise, but I have to return to real life – the divine book and the delicious movie collections (whom I miss like crazy), the loving (ludicrous) family (hate to quote from Oz, but there’s no place like home), the abhorrent (atrocious) exams (and a couple of thousand of pages to memorize, understand and analyze), and, of course, the absolutely alarming amount of almighty dollars which I owe (in euros it can be summed up as the number of minutes Veronica Mars kept us entertained (if you’re really bad at math, just use Amazon.com)).
Yesterday I managed to finish The Sparrow which is a great feat unto itself – a huge 400+ page hardcover with small margins in just one sitting. Now to the book – a science fiction epic about priests in space whom initiate first contact. I know. I assumed it would be awful, but it just wasn’t the case. It proved to be a wonderful yarn about space exploration, anthropology, tolerance and the consequences of every action – a fine introduction to chaos theory. Funny, gripping and, most of all, thought-provoking, The Sparrow is a space tale that appeals even to die-hard atheists like me. Highly recommended. Read the first third of Target then got bored of thrills so Ialso started Prador Moon.
Right, day eighteen. Went for a walk (after which it started pouring rain again) and a final visit to Book-Off. Picked up the following for just 14€:
Aldous Huxley • Brave New World; Glen Cook • Passage at Arms; Glen Cook • The Dragon Never Sleeps; Neal Asher • Prador Moon; John Armstrong • Grey; Liz Williams • The Demon & The City; Dean Koontz • Strangers; Matthew Kneale • English Passengers.
Also, for 7€: Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons’ masterpieces (one’s from Gollancz and the other from Bantam, but still). If anyone’s keeping count, that’s 31 good, great and outstanding books for a measly 61.5€, not even 2€ per book as a whole (forgot to mention I bought Joe Meno • The Boy Detective Fails, exchanged Light Music and paid to buy China Mieville • Lombres (french version of Un Lun Dun)). Now this has, in fact, been a absolutely fantastic trip.
