Gloat If You Must
I'm guessing that I've got at least a half-dozen "I Told You So/So Long, Sucker" emails waiting for me, though I can't confirm that for sure because there was a power outage in San Marcos, Texas last night that knocked my email server offline and the stoner who operates it didn't wake up for the day until about an hour ago. So if you think I'm being a coward, I'm not. I just don't have access.
I'll take this interstice to announce that I've read three books since the Phoenix Suns last won a game. I was out of town last weekend on a top-secret mission related to my Judaism and had a few airplane hours combined with some hotel-room time. The books were short, but they are books, so they count. Book Number 20 was Silbermann, by Jacques de Lacretelle, sent to me by someone who saw that I was keeping a book journal and thought that I would be the ideal vehicle for promoting a reprint of a 1922 novel, in translation, about anti-Semitism at a Paris lycee. The book is simply written, powerful, and morally challenging. Have at it, kids.
Number 21 was a book about the Kabbalah, but please don't make fun of me. I'd heard about a guy named Sabbatai Zevi, a Jewish mystic who declared himself Messiah in the 17th Century and persuaded the entire diaspora to follow him to Turkey, where he promptly converted to Islam. The book had some good anecdotes about that.
Then there was book 22, Original Bliss by A.L. Kennedy, which I have in my possession because the library was out of that Paradise thing people seem to be reading. Sometimes books cross your path just because. There's not much I can do with a novel of "ideas" about an abused housewife having an affair with a motivational speaker in Germany.