It snowed on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and I curled up on the couch with a cup of hot tea and a good book. Life was good.
James Kestrel's Five Decembers is a crime novel like no others -- it's the experience of a police detective trapped in Japan during WWII, having been wrongfully arrested in Hong Kong the night before the Japanese invaded. The detective, Joe McGrady, was in Hong Kong investigating a murder in Honolulu whose trail led through Wake Island as he pursued a mysterious killer with an unknown motive.
At some point while I was reading this, I realized how easily I get lost in books. Hours pass without noticing as the rest of the world fades from focus. Books grant that in a way so few other things do -- the ability to forget everything else and become immersed in a fictional narrative world, where characters drawn from someone's imagination suddenly become the most important thing and their fate hangs in the balance between chapters. Just one more chapter, I tell myself for the 15th time.
I'd love to write like that one day, because it seems like such a wondrous gift to be able to give to people, especially in a world so stressful, so demanding. If you can give someone liberation for an afternoon, for a day, that seems like a good thing.
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