Spare parts

I've taken quite a break from 2666, to break away from all the rotten death of part 4 (The Part About the Crimes), and just to be able to read something — finish something! — less than 1000 pages long. But I find myself starting in on the last volume (The Part About Archimboldi), and I'm wildly excited about this, I want to take notes as I go, things are gelling.

(Really, I shouldn't read more than one book, or maybe two, at a time. I'm no good at it, never have been. It makes me feel uncentred.)

(Especially when there's no time, there hasn't been any time, where does the time go?, my sister came to visit, and J-F went off for a camping weekend, and the kid and I play and play (she's off to day camp next week), and the weather's shitty rainy the whole time so we can't just go to the park where she'd play and I'd watch and read, we have to do indoor things, which takes a lot more ingenuity and patience, plus you have to clean up, meanwhile work is a little crazy, and there must be 83 loads of laundry to do, the closet shelving is falling down, and I think the bathroom is starting to smell, there's just no time.)

I am currently playing catch-up on the Infinite Summer project; I've re-read the first 80 odd pages of Infinite Jest, which I'd read a couple years ago, and some beyond, but I'm not quite up to schedule yet.

Also, for some reason I thought now would be a good time to finish up The Adventures of Amir Hamza, which I'm not even half-way through, and I can't begin to estimate just how many bathroom trips it might take.

So, between volumes of 2666 seemed like an excellent time to squeeze in some actual reading, of the kind where you actually get to close the book after a few days, maybe feel a faint sense of accomplishment in so doing.

Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Sun Over Breda, which, sadly, bored me, in the way that I'm just not into the minutiae of battle, no matter how glorious the language, but it was quick and it's over. (He's an interesting writer for being so visual. Very obviously he's knowledgeable about fine art and greatly inspired by it.)

And I closed Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night, which was nice — just in that kinship you feel with Manguel, that love for and comfort in books and libraries.

(I never did write about my brief encounter with him, my seeing him deliver one of the Massey Lectures. Apart from the lecture itself, which was fascinating and for which I still have notes lying around somewhere, he's a lovely man. He signed my book for me and I asked him what he was reading back then in November 2007: He smiled shyly and apologized before answering. "It sounds so pedantic." Locke's On Tolerance. Yes, for pleasure. But his face lit up in telling me he'd just finished the latest Reginald Hill, Death Comes for the Fat Man. Manguel highly recommends Dalziel and Pascoe: "You must start at the beginning. They're wonderful!" (I've never read them, but I might.))

And poetry! I'm making my way through a volume of Janusz Szuber, and while I can't say it gives me a sense of accomplishment exactly (poetry causes for me something more like befuddlement), my brain feels stretched in all the right places for it.

Things are gelling. I mean ideas are, in my head.

I whipped across the street to Indigo at lunch yesterday to hear Lewis Black, shilling for his latest book (Me of Little Faith). He didn't read from the book, but talked quite soberly (albeit entertainingly) about the craft of writing, his basic advice being, Just write. Don't think about it. If you start thinking, you realize it's crap, and so you don't bother to write it down cuz it's crap, you feel you have to think it through, and so you go have a think and before you know it you're napping, and you wake up and give up on the whole crap idea of writing. But if you write it down, at least you know where it might go, even if you have to rewrite everything to get there. Basically.

Also he noted that he thinks differently whether he's typing or writing longhand — a different process entirely. And then he answered questions for half an hour.

But about things gelling. I guess I mean associations are gelling. Cuz the whole time I'm listening to Lewis Black, I'm thinking about Infinite Jest. Particularly as Black rants about the fact that television and computers haven't been fully merged yet — it's the same screen!, the problem is money, they haven't figured out how to distribute the money they'd make yet — and I'm thinking teleputers! Wallace had the TP all figured out. And Black goes on about this human urge for entertainment, and really, whether you're flaked out on the couch watching Comedy Central or lolling away the afternoon reading Chekhov, it's really the same thing. And I'm thinking, yeah. And I think about asking Black for his thoughts on Wallace, but I realize I know next to nothing about either Black or Wallace to be able to gauge whether I might be on to something so I discard the impulse, but some kind of neuronal connection has already been made and I can't shake it.

The oyster of imagination

So I finished that little Turgenev novel (more on this on the morrow), and then I finished off that little work of juvenile fiction I'd left off, and I found myself sitting around the house wondering what the hell I'm to read next, it being the first occasion in months where I didn't have a plan, or some next great thing beckoning me — I have instead a very modest selection of somber, or at least soberingly intimidating, works on my shelf awaiting their right time and my proper attention (Bolaño! Lem! Pynchon! and more Lem!) — and all the while there is a recent nagging itch in the corner of my mind telling me, "More Turgenev," that is not eased by the most rational retort that simply there is none on hand, and I almost resort to imploring you, dear Reader, to suggest something — You who are never short on suggestions, but, frankly, more likely to leave me feeling confused and unfocused (no offense; it reflects poorly on me, not You) — when I realize it's late, time to turn in, sleep on it, something will come to me in time for the morning commute, but nothing has come but great fever upon my child, which does save me from braving the métro bookless, or unsuitably or irresponsibly booked, but brings with it, combined with the difficulty of dealing with work issues in a manner not face to face, instead a plague of other worries from which by noon I am in desperate need of relief: a respite of fiction with a cappuccino, please; when my eye should fall upon a book long discarded, abandoned, no — I'd merely set it aside awhile. I speak of The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, by Ghalive Lahnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami, my bookmark at page 311, propitiously the start of Book Two:

The imperious pen departs to conquer the dominions of rhetoric, girding itself to trek the blank stretches of paper, and delivers the account of Amir's journey, painting a host of new episodes and choice encounters before the mind's eye.

What a lavish feast! Too rich to be devoured in one sitting.

Today Amir comes to a fork in the path and is tricked into taking the one by which his army surely will die of thirst; his "obedient servant" proffers a poisoned goatskin, from which Amir is saved, by fate, by luck, by chivalrous manners and in good humour, and by a voice upon the wind, from drinking.

Really. All that in just two pages.

I am faced with a fresh problem: wanting to know what happens next versus the encumbrance of this very big book. It will not commute easily and I'll have to plan ahead: no room for a packed lunch in my bag, I'll have to dress to wear the shoes I left under my desk, and work will have to stay at work — I won't be able to carry the laptop too.

"Divers of the sea of traditions extract treasures of discourse from the oyster of imagination, and bear forth the luminous offering of the pearls of narrative..."

Enchanted

This book is gorgeous. The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie, casts quite a spell.

I've never read a novel of Rushdie's before (though his editorials are of great interest and I greatly admired his performance in Bridget Jones' Diary), nor have I ever felt particularly inclined to. Something about this book, though, drew me to it.

It's been a long time since I was excited about a book's glorious physicality. It's a completely subjective experience, and my impression is one I'm entirely unable to explain, but I think this book as physical object is beautiful, and I want to fondle it, turn it over and over and over.

The dust jacket is yellow and orange-red, the colour of spice, and it makes me hungry. Its design is a weird mix of Florentine flourish and orientalist illumination.

The most striking element, to me, is the endsheets — a minor detail, but one that has me exclaiming, "Look at this! Isn't this book beautiful?!" Beautiful!

As for the story, it's magical and riveting. I've had a hard time putting it aside. It's been the perfect complement to my reading of Amir Hamza, similar in flavour, but more modern (read: accessible) in its language and pacing — and I was thrilled to see the great hero referenced herein — and to the family's recent viewing of Sinbad movies. There's nothing I love so much as a vaguely middle-eastern mystical mythical adventure romance.

Pirates! A mysterious ambassador! Brothels! Secrets! An imaginary queen made real! Revenge! A forgotten princess! A painting the painter hides himself in! Vampires (and none other than Vlad Dracula himself)! Tulip superstitions! The four Swiss albino giants (Otho, Botho, Clotho, and D'Artagnan)! Macchiavelli! A magic mirror! Screaming mandrake roots!

Behind the fabulous stories is a philosophical exploration of being in the world.

The emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning "the great," and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory — the Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, over-sexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too much to be a single human personage — this all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first person plural — had begun to meditate, during his long, tedious journey home, on which he was accompanied by the heads of his defeated enemies bobbing in their sealed earthen pickle-jars, about the disturbing possibilities of the first person singular — the "I."

The interminable days of slow equestrian progress encouraged many languid wonderings in a man of speculative temperament, and the emperor pondered, as he rode, such matters as the mutability of the universe, the size of the stars, the breasts of this wives, and the nature of God. Also, today, this grammatical question of the self and its Three Persons, the first, the second and the third, the singulars and plurals of the soul. He, Akbar, had never referred to himself as "I," not even in private, not even in anger or dreams. He was — what else could he be? — "we." He was the definition, the incarnation of the We. He had been born into plurality. When he said "we," he naturally and truly meant himself as an incarnation of all his subjects, of all his cities and lands and rivers and mountains and lakes, as well as all the animals and plants and trees within his frontiers, and also the birds that flew overhead and the mordant twilight mosquitoes and the nameless monsters in their underworld lairs, gnawing slowly at the roots of things; he meant himself as the sum total of all this victories, himself as containing the characters, the abilities, the histories, perhaps even the souls of his decapitated or merely pacified opponents; and, in addition, he meant himself as the apogee of his people's past and present, and the engine of their future.

There are human mirrors. Doubles. Reflections. East and west. Counterparts comprising a whole. Dream, reality. God, man. Plot parallels and situational analogues.

There is great awe of women and the mysterious power of the feminine that holds sway over even emperors.

Sometimes in the woods near the farm in Percussina he lay on the leaf-soft ground and listened to the two-tone song of the birds, high low high, high low high low, high low high low high. Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie. Because he was a man fond of precision he wanted to capture the hidden truth precisely, to see it clearly and set it down, the truth beyond ideas of right and wrong, ideas of good and evil, ideas of ugliness and beauty, all of which were aspects of the surface deceptions of the world, having little to do with how things really worked, disconnected from the whatness, the secret codes, the hidden forms, the mystery.

Here in this woman's body the mystery could be seen.

There are pages of bibliographic references at the novel's close, among which is listed Calvino's Italian Folktales. A good reason to pull that one down off the shelf for a revisit.

And it's funny.

"The Hindustani storyteller always knows when he loses his audience," he said. "Because the audience simply gets up and leaves, or else it throws vegetables, or, if the audience is the king, it occasionally throws the storyteller head-first off the city ramparts. And in this case, my dear Mogor-Uncle, the audience is indeed the king."

Bestowing a robe of honour

Being the 1st-quarter progress report as it regards my attempt to meet the reading challenge I signed on for.

The book: The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, by Ghalive Lahnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami.

The beginning.

A favourite sentence: "The following night it suddenly snowed so hard and became so bitingly cold that tongues froze inside people's mouths."

An extended excerpt.

Where I'm at: page 250, more than a quarter of the way through and nearing the end of Book One. I hadn't read from this tome in weeks, if not longer, till this weekend. Its physical size has a lot to do with this: I wouldn't dream of carrying this book with me on my daily commute, and the rest follows. Simply: I pick up, and then read to finish, much smaller books instead.

Intent to finish: absolute and reinvigorated. Robes of honour! Tricksters spiking the wine! The tales are messianically magical and the language is exquisite.

The might of the reed is tested by the narrative's power, and the vigor of the swashbucklers of colorful accounts is now manifested in the arena of the page.

I marveled to the limits of marveling

I don't know why I like this story so much:

The emperor said: "O Amar! You speak verily, and your words are to our liking! The gates of the city are two farsangs from here. Both of you take an arrow and remove yourself thither. Whoever shall return first after handing his arrow to the guard on gate, shall win precedence over the other!"

The two acquiesced, and at the emperor's orders they were each given an arrow. Both arrayed themselves and set off like lightning, running shoulder to shoulder, flying like sparks, like arrows shot from a well-strung bow. They had gone some distance from the royal procession when Amar purposely lagged behind, and Aatish managed to put half-a-league's distance between them.

Those who witnessed this said, "To no purpose Amar lost all his prestige and distinction by making such a perilous wager with Aatish, who finally outpaced Amar!" Aatish was about to reach the gates of the city and show the soles of his feet to Amar, when Amar leapt into the air realizing that people would be throwing ridicule at him. The Father of Racers and Tumblers of the World turned a somersault alongside Aatish, delivered him a kick in flight, and bit him hard and so strangled his neck that Aatish fell flat on his back, all his speed and quickness having fled him; the taste of agony alone remained in his mouth. As a stone struck Aatish's head during his fall, it splintered his skull, and he lay all bathed in a rivulet of blood. Thus shocked and confounded he fell unconscious.

Amar then took Aatish's headdress of an ayyar and, handing his arrow to the guard, said to him, "Mark me well! I am Amar Ayyar! The renown of my ayyari has reached the lands and kingdoms of far and near! In me the deceiver finds no refuge for his device, and I give the liar the lie! Beware, lest you be prevailed upon through bribery to bear false witness and state that it was Aatish who first handed you the shaft, and that Amar arrived and delivered his later! Woe betide you, O lad, should you lie! Beware and be warned, and let not greed be your undoing! Speak verily before the emperor, and do not dissemble or speak false!"

The guard was much bewildered at these words, and marveled to the limits of marveling at their import and at the calamity that had thus visited him uninvited. Amar retraced his steps, and took himself to the emperor's presence. After kissing his stirrup, Amar produced Aatish's headdress to him, at which the emperor broke out laughing at Amar's roguery. Then all the flash and flourish of Aatish became things of the past, and he was so embarrassed that he never again showed his face in the court.

— From The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, by Ghalive Lahnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami.

Big books

A challenge to sink my teeth into: Chunkster Challenge 2008.

I wasn't able to meet my own self-designed standards last year, but I better know my limitations for it, and I'm willing to play by more relaxed rules this time: 4 books of >450 pages, read between January 1 and December 20. (Hosted by So Many Books, So Little Time. Sign up before March 1!)

Ahem. My candidates:

1. Currently reading: The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami (948 pages, including notes). This is the first book I started reading this year; I'm on page 162.

2. Up soon: The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon, by Alexandre Dumas (751 pages, including appendix), received recently. I've read a bit of the introduction, and it's hard not to find the existence of this manuscript a little suspicious. Of course, this increases my enthusiasm for reading it — I'm determined to prove it's a fake.

3. The book I couldn't finish last year: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace (1079 pages, including footnotes). I'll try again. Really. I left off at page 85. I may or may not revisit those first bits.

4. Something else. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov. Or maybe this is Pynchon's year. Maybe.

(Via.)

Colours and follies

Weeks ago, I dipped into Orhan Pamuk's Other Colors: Essays and a Story, as I said I would. I start in the middle and find myself driven forward, wondering what happens next, and finally it occurs to me to ask what came before.

Sampling these essays at random, it turns out, is not the best approach. The preface holds the key. (Sadly I was not forced to read the preface when first I opened the book.) Pamuk has arranged these ideas and fragments deliberately, into a continuous narrative.

I have always believed there to be a greedy and almost implacable graphomaniac inside me — a creature who can never write enough, who is forever setting life in words — and that to make him happy I need to keep writing. But when I was putting this book together, I discovered that the graphomaniac would be much happier, and less pained by his writing illness, if he worked with an editor who gave his writing a center, a frame, and a meaning. I would like the sensitive reader to pay as much attention to my creative editing as to the effort I put into the writing itself.

So I start again from the beginning. And there is a story to be told here.

I don't remember why I turned over the corner of this page in "On My Name Is Red." Maybe for some realization regarding Pamuk's relationship to painting — he grew up wanting to be a painter. Or maybe for this: "My fragility, my filth, my depravity, and my shortcomings — they are not in the fabric of the book, in its language or its structure, but they can be made out in the characters' lives and stories."

I've come to like Pamuk less than I like his novels. He refers often to going through rough times, loneliness, depression. His taking refuge in books quickly loses the sheen of romanticization; his escape into books feels quite desperate. But then I think: this too, this whole book, is contrived to manipulate me. There are essays on and insights into Istanbul, a childhood lived therein, earthquakes, Nabokov, literature in general, and more. They are if sincere, as first I thought, depressing; if not sincere, then a little more awesome for the force of their combined structure, but disillusioning. I'm not sure which state I prefer.

*****

If ever again I turn to freelancing and work from home, I might follow Pamuk's example in establishing routine and discipline: dress and prepare in the morning as if for the office, leave the house, walk round the block, re-enter one's house-as-office, and then at the end of the day pack up and leave to walk back to the same space this time home.

*****

Just before Christmas I picked up Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies. My expectations were low, as most reviews, both published and personal, were lukewarm about it.

As it turns out, it was, for me, the perfect book at the perfect time, lifting me out of the noise of Christmas, and out of the depressing funk Pamuk had cast, to float just beyond the reach of stress.

For all their outlandish behaviour, grand gestures, and bold words, there was something so perfectly ordinary and believable and interesting about all the characters, which I suspect I may not perceive in this way at any other time of year. I'm losing the details of the story already, but certain observations and characterizations (what kind of man where's a white shirt and tie around the house in the afternoon?) have left a mark.

What lucky fools we all are.

*****

Christmastime is the time of the annual jigsaw puzzle. This year I would initiate Helena into the family tradition — where by family, in this case I mean me and my sister, and it was never really planned so much as it just worked out that way, that we would one or the other of us receive a puzzle at Christmas and have to start it straight away, hunching over the dining room table, squinting, for one, maybe two, near-sleepless nights, our mother pleading with us can we move the puzzle please, where are we going to eat, it's so dusty, but we did this for years, every year, I don't remember how it started, now we have to plan a little because we are less likely to spend sufficiently long periods of time together under the same roof.

I'm surprised at how geeky the whole puzzle endeavour is this year. That I should build up the significance and the fun of the puzzle is one thing, but I was compelled to plan, to consider the initiation — that Helena is capable of 100 pieces on her own but I would not want her to feel daunted at the sight of, say, 3000 pieces each the size of one of her fingers, not her whole hand, that I lit on the perfect enticement: a Doctor Who theme, bearing a geek factor all its own, which I researched and special-ordered, settling on a product not dated by a specific Doctor's face nor that of a specific companion, and a modest piece count, well in advance, and wrapped and put under the tree.

I keep thinking of The Gold Bug Variations: she watches the 2 men puzzle together at the cabin, one of them searching the board to find a fit for the piece in his hand, the other searching the table to find the piece that fits a chosen spot.

For years, forever, I was of the first type. I'm shocked by the realization that I am now the latter. I'm certain that the attitude must reflect one's philosophical approach to life, but I struggle with what exactly that might mean.

*****

Thursday, Helena (age 5), after years(!) of denying her father's teasing suggestions that she has a daycare amoureux — Poilly is the only one, she insists (they do sleep together after all) — announces that Emile est son prince, and they're going to marry — Emile is her amoureux, and today they kissed on the mouth!

She interrupts our occasional stolen moments, in the car, at the grocery: "Why are you doing that? Why are you doing what Emile and I do?"

*****

Friday at lunch I gather myself up to go the post office and discover I must've lost my sister's birthday present on my way into work. This distresses me to tears. The website of the metro's lost and found advises it can take 48 hours for an object to reach the central office; they're closed on the weekend; my sister's present will never reach her in time — and these revised timelines rely on the fact that there is kindness in strangers, to turn in a small plastic bag containing a box and a scrap of wrapping paper sized to cover it, but untaped because we ran out of tape at home. I let myself cry over this, because I can't be seen to be phased by the $5000 mistake I made at work, which was uncovered earlier this week, for which my stomach is in knots, over which I've lost sleep. I spend the afternoon obsessing over what I might give my sister instead, though still late, and fixing other people's faulty graphs and references so they might obtain FDA approval. My way home I scour the ground — the corners of the metro station, and outdoors, the shapes of fresh snow mounds — for that small white plastic bag. I console myself, that this is the cosmos taking a little something back for all the free books and door prizes I've received lately, that someone else may benefit by this.

My sister's birthday present is sitting on the shelf inside my front door.

*****

For the umpteenth time we watch the Doctor Who episode "Utopia," and this umpteenth time it occurs to Helena to ask me, "What does 'utopia' I mean?" I summarize the concept as best as I can, but before I get round to explaining how Thomas More coined the term, she is laughing. "Me-topia, Me-topia, Me-topia!"

I record this here not as an instance of the cute things the child says, per se, but because I marvel at how her brain works.

*****

Saturday we stop for gas. As J-F is pulling back out onto the service road, he asks me for his gloves. "I don't have them." "Where are my gloves?" I make a joke, but as soon as I say it, I know it to be true: "You probably left them on the roof of the car." The car has turned, it's too late to stop, and dangerous now to slow down. We watch in the rearview mirror as one glove flops onto the road. We're halfway into the curve of the exit ramp when the wind lifts glove number two and throws it into a snowbank. I laugh, or else I would cry. The gloves I gave him for Christmas.

We track back through the parking lot that's on the other side of the ditch, only it's winter and the ditch is a 20-foot high pile of snow, the length of... I don't know how to measure length in the suburbs, but it must be about 4 city blocks. J-F stops the car and goes over the top.

Just as I start imagining what terrible accident might've transpired on the other side of that white wall, I notice the dark speck ahead running toward us, waving one black leather glove overhead.

We drive forward, just outside the gas station we'd started from. Repeat.

My unoriginal gift. His gallant grand gesture.

(I think he's lost them since.)

*****

The snow had been falling like oobleck. I take respite in thinking that Montreal that night bore a striking resemblance to a magical Persia of centuries ago.

"The following night it suddenly snowed so hard and became so bitingly cold that tongues froze inside people's mouths." (From The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction.)

On The Adventures of Amir Hamza

Let us not forget its glorious subtitle: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction (which has to be the very best subtitle ever!).

From The Washington Post:

The Adventures of Amir Hamza represents a marvelous dovetailing of fantasy, history and religion. This book demonstrates the ways that colorful storytelling can be an important part of both religious texts and adventure yarns, and the way a charismatic figure may become something very like public property, capturing the popular imagination and giving storytellers a vessel for their ideas.

From The New York Times:

Even in translation, "The Adventures of Amir Hamza" is a wonder and a revelation — a classic of epic literature in an interpretation so fluent that it is a pleasure to sit down and lose oneself in it. The story line itself is endlessly diverting and inventive, and the prose of the translation is beautifully rendered.

Moreover, the book gives a unique insight into a lost Indo-Islamic courtly world. For although "The Adventures of Amir Hamza" was originally a Persian production set in the Middle East, the Urdu version shows how far the story was reimagined into an Indian context in the course of many years of subcontinental retelling. Though the original Mesopotamian place names survive, the world depicted is not that of early Islamic Iraq, but of 18th-century late Mughal India, with its love of gardens, its obsession with poetic wordplay and its extreme refinement in food, dress and manners. Many of the characters have Hindi names; they make oaths like "as Ram is my witness"; and they ride on elephants with jeweled howdahs. To read "The Adventures of Amir Hamza" is to come as close as is now possible to the world of the Mughal campfire — those night gatherings of soldiers, sufis, musicians and hangers-on that one sees illustrated in Mughal miniatures, a storyteller beginning his tale in a clearing of a forest as the embers of the blaze glow red and the eager faces crowd around.

First chapter.

See also the translator's blog.

I received a copy some weeks ago, but it wasn't till a few days ago that I decided to commit to it, breaking in the new year with this new book.

I'm on page 53 and I've yet to meet Amir Hamza, but every page thus far has been laden with riches. Truly marvelous.