yesterday when leaving Nepali class on foot -- walking to B's lab to pick up my scooter which I'd left there yesterday -- I stumbled on a little bookstore with a pile of books in the door, above them a sign in Nepali saying they were a hundred rupees each. I noticed them when a girl stopped to look… and despite my best intentions, I stopped, too. You see, I've bought quite a few books this week slash month.

But they were only 100 rs!

I bought five.

Some had a little damage on the side or along the tops of the pages, but this one hasn't got much. I've never read a Henning Mankell kids' book before, so if it's good, I'll pass it on to my girls when I'm done.

It's hard to believe I've had this book for so long without reading it! But I finally got to it last week so that I can send it to another BCer once the post office reopens.

Strange little book. Probably one of the odder children’s books I’ve ever read...if not for the Strange Library by Haruki Murakami it would probably be the oddest. A few slow bits, but interesting and readable, though I found the end a little anti-climactic. I wonder what a child reading it would think. On thinking about it, I wonder if it's the quality of the writing that makes it so good--it doesn't talk down to the reader.

Something that struck me is that while you’d say that overall Joel Gustafson was quite a conscientious kid, he had no compulsion at all about lying; he did it throughout the whole book, yet never seems to consider it wrong.

[Reserved for estelle1806]