February turned out ot be quite different than the banner month of January, as far as reading was concerned. I only notched up 4 books as opposed to the 8 I read the previous month. I did hit a dry spell of about one week without a book. I have been trying to keep three books on hand for towns with either no english language book stores or trading facilities that some hotels have. I just couldn't find any shops in El Salvador or Honduras that had anything much less something worth reading. Add the week long dry spell to the fact that I left Independence Day by Richard Ford on a bus when I was over half the way through (and it was really getting good, mind you) and it turned out to be not such a bad month. The reading list was forced by the avability of books and it tuned out to be sub par, in my opinion. Regardless, here they were:
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene - Just OK with a few good spots. About a whiskey priest in Mexico running from certain persecution and death, suprise, he dies.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Munro - Pretty good for all the hype it received, but the last third kinda drug out.
One Hunred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Fantastic! Hard to keep track of all the Buendias with similar names (Arcadio, Aureliano, Juan Arcadio and so on) but the circle was completed with unparalled brilliance in the final 50 pages. Great read, just keep referencing the helpul outline on page 1 if you read this.
Shampoo Planet by Douglass Copeland - A bit of a sophomore slump, if you ask me, following his great book 'Generation X'. The final chapters did bring it back into positve territory. Very dated as a 1992 novel, but interesting to look at things from that times point of view, knowing what we know now (aka: post Windows '95).
I did find a used book shop in San Jose that had a lot of stuff and a new book shop that is wildly overpriced but beggars can't be choosers, right?!
