My Love Affair with Books: Books with pictures

The other day we were in the Borders and I really really wanted to buy this little picture book called The Gift of Nothing.

 

 

 EP wouldn't hear about it. Too wasteful he said. Look at all the blank spaces (granted the style of the illustrator is very minimalistic) on so few pages! Basically he's putting his foot down, since spendthrift is against his principle.

As a peace lover, I said okay okay. I won't buy it (then and there). Although I will buy it eventually you can count on that.

Having made the compromise (and fulfilled the Gift of Nothing), I told EP that there's a thing about me that he should know.

There are two kinds of books that I have zero ZERO resistance to: picture books for the tiny teeny little people, and books about food, especially the ones with lotsa & lotsa glossy pictures.

To me, they are the all consuming flames and I'm a desperate DESPERATE moth coming out of the dark ages.

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I'm quite embarrassed to say that I finally after N months finished this book Little Indiscretions. It's about how a cook was murdered. It's written by a Spanish language writer. The whole book smells of the writer's cleverness to the extent of choking. The book jmho will be 5 times better if it's half the length and with only a pinch of the writer's smartassness.

This book is the 2.5th Latin American literature that I read. The other 1.5 are:

Like water for chocolate 1.0

100 years of solitude 0.5 (Since this book is essentially an account of the reincarnation of 2 characters, I find it too hard to keep straight who's whose reincarnation and how many generations we have gone through. It's of no help when people never die by generation.)

All 2.5 books have one thing in common - fate. It's omnipresent, either on the characters' or the writers' mind. Cosmic power is the driver of everything. Human intervention is futile. I kept sensing deja vu because they are not that different from the classic Chinese literature.