From One Puddle to Another...

One thing I despise, is boredom.
I hate boredom.
I am seldom bored.
But I am very prone to being bored, when driving.
And I hate radio.
So, last night, when I was faced with the prospect of 3 hours on the highway, I made a last minute decision.
I pulled into a record store. Having no clue what I should buy, I aimlessly wandered. I just knew that a good CD or two would get me through the highway drive. The first one that caught my interest was the latest Rush CD, Snakes and Arrows, so I nabbed that.
Then, I happened across this new one called Famous, by Puddle of Mudd.
Picked it up, it looked intriguing. My Reading Partner has spoken highly of them, for years. Hmmm… what really got me, was when I flipped it over and saw that certain tracks were produced by Jack Joseph Puig. I remembered the amazing work he did about a hundred years ago with a now defunct “Christian” outfit called Sweet Comfort Band.
So I bought the thing.
WOW!
It is fabulous.
When I discover good music like this, I always get excited about it. Now I want to collect other CD’s by this band.
The first track [Famous] is a killer good song. What’s it like? Well…. really punchy guitar, terrifically raspy, screamy vocals, and an overall sound that somehow reminds me of Three Doors Down.
The next song, well, no…. I’m not going to go through the whole songlist, they are ALL good.
The penultimate song, called Radiate, reminded me of Oasis. The CD alternates between wonderfully raunchy rock sounds, sometimes laced with expertly placed profanity, and nice melodic lovesongs [sans profanity].
I urge all Bookpuddle readers to venture into this…. this other Puddle.
Puddle of Mudd.
One thing this CD ain’t….. is boring!

********

Splash du Jour: Friday

Faithless

I’ve got my own moral compass to steer by
A guiding star beats a spirit in the sky
And all the preaching voices –
Empty vessels ring so loud
As they move among the crowd
Fools and thieves are well disguised
In the temple and the marketplace

Like a stone in the river
Against the floods of spring
I will quietly resist

Like the willows in the wind
Or the cliffs along the ocean
I will quietly resist

I don’t have faith in faith
I don’t believe in belief
You can call me faithless
But I still cling to hope
And I believe in love
And that’s faith enough for me

I’ve got my own spirit level for balance
To tell if my choice is leading up or down
And all the shouting voices
Try to throw me off my course
Some by sermons, some by force
Fools and thieves are dangerous
In the temple and marketplace

Like a forest bows to winter
Beneath the deep white silence
I will quietly resist

Like a flower in the desert
That only blooms at night
I will quietly resist.
--- RUSH – Neil Peart, lyrics to Faithless –

Have a great Friday!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

“If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.”
-- Holden, in ch.17 of Catcher In The Rye –

Here’s a little quick morning exercise for you.
How many of the Top 10 Banned Books of the 20th Century have you read, you naughty thing, you?
I’ve read five of them. Click → HERE.

LOOK SWELL, and have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

In discussing what is meant by being born again (or better, in view of the Greek, "born from above"), in chapter 3 [of the Gospel of John] John makes it abundantly clear that what is being talked about is the fact that all humans are to have two births -- the natural birth from "water," as a human baby, and a second birth, which is spiritual. The "born again" experience is that of recognizing one's true nature as a spark of the Divine -- the light that gives light to everyone coming into the world. It has nothing whatever to do with what evangelicals describe as recognizing one's status as a sinner and "accepting Christ as Saviour." There is nowhere in the Gospels where this condition for "becoming a Christian" is ever laid out in the manner, for example, in which the famous Evangelist Billy Graham presents it. The traditional church teaching that we all, by our very nature as part of the human family, are contaminated by "original sin," that is, by the sin of our mythical forefather Adam -- Paul says that "in Adam all died" (because of his sin) -- and that we add to this by our own sinful acts, has been the basis for clerical control all down the ages.
-- Tom Harpur, in Water Into Wine –

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Do you think God gets stoned?
← I think so . . . look at the platypus.
-- Robin Williams –

Have a great Tuesday!

44 Seconds

“Out, out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow.”
-- Bill Shakespeare –

Yesterday and today, I have succeeded in asking all of my colleages at work a very simple, yet off-putting question. [You can try this yourself right here, it will be fun, I promise you].
One by one, and only when alone, I have presented the following preamble and question:
“I am only allowing you two to three seconds to answer this question OK? I want your first impression, not a mathematically worked out equation. It’s very simple, and it is not a trick question. Remember. TWO or THREE seconds, I want a quick answer. If you take longer than that, I don’t wanna hear it. Ready?”
[They nod, because they know I am weird, and they love me for it....]
“OK, here goes. Here is the question.....”

The average human lifetime consists of HOW MANY DAYS?

One Mississippi... two Mississippi.... three Mississippi.
Any longer than this and the person disqualifies themself from my experiment, because what I am looking for is not how well someone does cranial algebra... I am looking for IMPRESSION..... for IDEA!
For.... pre-conceptions!
And Holy Hypotenuse! Did I ever hear some doozies for answers!
The most bizarre (I am not kidding)... was one guy who blurted out “Eight million!”
No actually the worst was one fellow who said “400”..... so I rephrased the question and then he said some astronomical amount. Most people though, when asked, said around 90,000 to 100,000.... stuff like that.
Amazingly, only one person even came close to what a reasonable estimate would be. He said 30,000.
All in all, this two days of research makes me glad that I am not working at a place that is trying to eliminate cancer from the earth, or build better nuclear reactors!
No, we’s just simple folk..... and with all due respect for those I spend nine hours a day with, the question isn’t all that easy if you have not given it any thought before.
The truth of the matter is this.
Average lifespan around the world is around double what it was 200 years ago. It is now around 65 for men, and 70 for women. Remember, this is WORLDWIDE. When we begin to look at specific countries, Japan wins the longevity contest, with men usually cashing in the chips at 77.6 years, and women saying “sayonara” at 84 to 85 years.
British men are saying “cheerio” at 75, while the dames are dropping the teacup on the floor a few months shy of 80.
French dudes are kickin’ it at 74.9 while the femmes are saying “fermez la porte” at 82.4.
In the U.S. of A., men are living to 72 and women to 79.

I am giving all these stats to show how I arbitrarily arrive at my own personal benchmark of 74 years.
I am going to be somewhat generous and say that most of us are probably going to say goodbye to it all at around 74.
So.... having said this.... how many days are there in 74 years?
Answer: 26,645.

74 years = 888 months = 3,848 weeks = 26,645 days = 648,240 hours = less than 40,000,000 seconds.
None of us will live for a million hours.
Not since the earlier pages of Genesis have people routinely lived for millions of hours.
To live just one million hours, you would have to be 114 years old.

Can I tell you now what fascinates me the most about the length of time that we do live, whether it be 70 years or 80 years or 95 years? Or even TEN years?
What fascinates me the most is how hard our hearts work during that time!
Just think for a moment of the earliest memory that you can recall. Perhaps a family vacation when you were a child. Or a pet dog you got for your fourth or fifth birthday, something like that.
Now consider, from that time to this moment..... your heart has been pumping like mad!
Never stopping. Never taking a day, or even a moment off. Never missing a cue.
Recently I read a book by Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland (a surgeon), and of the heart, he said:
“Pushing out about 70 milliliters of blood (2 1/3rd ounces) with each contraction, this vigorous pump drives some 7 million milliliters (more than 14,000 pints) each day, in 100,000 rhythmic and powerful beats.”
WOW!
OK, so I got the calculator fired up again....

Nuland’s observation means that if you are 40 years old, your heart has already re-directed 25,550,000 (25 ½ million) GALLONS of blood through your body in an endless series of 1,460,000,000 flawlessly orchestrated convulsions! Almost a billion and a half times! It has never taken a weekend off, and even while you slept, it carried on.
If that is not fascinating, I don’t know what is. A half pound of meat, does all this work.

OK, so I want to put into perspective now..... try to visualize what is being talked about here.
I think of Niagara Falls.

I LOVE Niagara Falls and I have been there perhaps ten times in my lifetime.
At peak periods, 150,000 gallons of water a SECOND pour over the American side of the Falls, and over on the Canadian side (shown in the image, above), it is 580,000 gallons. A second.
This translates to almost 35 million gallons per minute over Horseshoe Falls.

Over a period of just forty years, your heart has already pumped 25.5 million gallons of blood.
This is the equivalent of the amount of water cascading over the American Niagara for 170 seconds, or nearly three minutes. And at Horseshoe Falls.... it is the equivalent of 44 seconds of the thunderous cataract.
44 seconds.
Believe me, I have stood at those Falls many a time, the spray on my face.
That’s a lot of water.
That’s a lot of blood.
2 1/3rd ounces at a time.
No man-made machine in the history of the world is as efficient as your heart is.

Put your hand over your heart.
If you are somewhere around 40 years old, you have had nearly a minute’s worth of Niagara Falls go on under that ribcage.
And you, like me, have been largely oblivious of the sheer mechanical frenzy of who you are.
One minute gone.
One minute left.

***********

Splash du Jour: Monday

It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
-- William Faulkner –

And out the door I go…
Have a great Monday, y’all.

Conceit: The Review

Conceit, by Mary Novik.
Forget your high-school textbook anthologies!
Mary Novik’s Conceit is nothing like that!
Hers is a brilliant and complex work featuring a sparkling cast of characters who step off the page as breathing – yea, sometimes panting.
A flawed, and sometimes tormented panoply of human beings.

Donne, whose literary fame rests on both his theological meditations and poetry and his earlier sensuous Cavalier lyrics both to Ann More and to his reputed mistresses (pre-Ann) forms the cog of the wheel of this narrative.
This poet’s extremes, as any student of 17th century English literary study knows, is the core of the Donne dichotomy.

For to say you like John Donne is to be met with the question: Which Donne? The Cavalier – who loved all he touched, or the enigmatic, untouchable Priest, whose writing reflected a man grappling with Puritan concepts of the evils of the flesh and a preoccupation with the subject of death?

Who was this man, so passionate in his love for Ann More that he risked everything to make her his wife only to later occupy high moral ground of the Anglican pulpit where - in sanctimonious tones - he decried his own sinful passion and her “voluptuous spirit”?
Was this pious priest the same lover who, thrown into jail for his union with her, wrote despairingly (and characteristically wittily) to her from prison the now famous phrase “John Donne. Ann Donne. Undone.”

The question not only of Love’s secret but also the poet’s identity is at the center of this page turner of a novel; and if that were Novik’s only focus, it would be question enough, indeed, to explore.
But – in something of a conceit itself, alongside Donne’s life story, deepening and complicating the answer to the riddle, is Novik’s largely fanciful story of Donne’s youngest daughter, Pegge and her own quest for love. A quest that would seem to drive her toward madness of the kind found in the pages of gothic fiction.

Novik leans Pegge’s longing and incisive memory narrative against the narrative voices of Donne (who wanders through the past and looks to the future as he waits to die and rise to a purified state), and Ann, whose haunting voice escapes from the grave to harry both John and Pegge to tell her story – the real story of the “undone” lovers. It is a request that Pegge seems to hear and to take on as her challenge.

Though there is ample bawdy here as Novik takes us in rich description to the beds of the book’s lovers, Conceit is no mere Harlequin romance telling in titillating tones the story of the famous and erotically charged lovelife of Ann More and John Donne. A rich display of creative nonfiction, the book rambles leisurely into Novik’s impressions (meticulously researched) of an historical London and its tapestries of plague, medicine (maggots, poultices of dead pigeons, etc.), fashion, politics, and personalities.

Novik, who said that she got the idea for the novel while wondering what Donne’s children would think of the steamy letters and poems that he had written to his wife, notes that Donne “wrote love poems like a priest and holy poems like a lover.” Not exactly the kind of stuff you’d leave as legacy to your offspring.

But legacy it becomes for Pegge, whose intelligent, independent voice relays much of the story, mingling her unflagging desire to find a love commensurate with her parents’ all consuming passion with her own apparent failure to find a mate suitable to her desires. Pegge’s early obsession with Izaak Walton, her father’s biographer, forms an intriguing subnarrative enhancing the book’s primary motifs.

Wanting to be remembered as a holy [and wholly] passionless man, after Ann dies in childbirth (their 12th), Donne denies the reality of the love they had shared…a love that had once compelled him to write of being buried with his love, entwined in an eternal embrace, as well as such heart-searing and ardent verse as “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

Donne has not completely succumbed to the sacrosanct, however: we overhear the dying Donne privately recollect his youth and admit in straightforward interior monologues to Ann that he would “rather be owner of you one hour than all else ever.” It is a desire that the pious Donne would like to destroy, but one that bespeaks the kind of absolute passion that daughter Pegge wants to find for her own life.

As Pegge follows her quest to discover "What is love?" – a question put to her ill and dying father in a most remarkable scene - Pegge, craving the kind of passion for which she knows (by reading Donne’s poems to her mother) that her father and mother shared, ultimately becomes something of her mother’s defender, a role that she sees as necessary largely because of Izaak Walton, whose Life of Donne seems to be an attempt to “sanctify” her father, erasing all his fleshly yearnings.

It is her insistence on seeing to it that both her father’s lust and his longing for spiritual purity are represented in Walton’s book that takes the book to its ending – and neatly (but not too neatly) wraps up Pegge’s search.

Novik, though she draws her major characters completely, does not weaken on the minor roles either: emerging in full-fledged array are Izaak Walton – whose Compleat Angler forms a backdrop for passages on fish and fishing unlike any I have ever read– and the irrepressible Samuel Pepys, from whose Diary Novik draws to portray yet another (moving) look at how a marriage contends with the effects of unbridled passion – this time for someone other than one’s spouse – a theme that, when closely examined, intensifies the book’s central theme of passion vs. a less flesh-dependent love.
Opening the book with a vivid portrait of the Great Fire of London, a scene that is probably drawn from Pepys’ account, Novik frames the narrative here: opening and closing with Pegge’s rescue of her father’s effigy from the inner sanctum of St. Paul’s Cathedral. (Having more than a little fun with her historical perspective, Novik has even seen to have Christopher Wren make a timely cameo appearance.)

As close to being creative memoir with historical grounding as a novel can be, Novik’s narrative in itself forms a kind of conceit as it offers both implied and overt comparisons between Donne’s love in his youth and age and those of his daughter Pegge.
The conceit – an elaborate and ingenious analogy - was the literary device for which Donne is known. Donne’s brilliant use of this literary device runs smoothly through the book as Novik pulls in a radiant array of lines from his work. Novik’s novel is scattered with lines from Donne’s work, sometimes surreptitiously placed, sometimes quoted in full. They only add more richness to a book already rich in descriptive, sensuous prose describing domestic activities, city life in London in the seventeenth century and natural settings.

As with any complex work of literature, it is impossible to fit Conceit into any kind of neat slot. It is fiction, it is biography, it is history.
But mostly it is a story of the conflicts found within us all – the longing for ….the higher and yet the yoked to physical and earthly pleasures.
No pretty little romantic story, Conceit can be a disquieting read on many levels, not the least being that – not to give too much away - Novik hints in several instances of what most would view as an unnatural, unhealthy love.
But it is the language and the questions it asks that ultimately may leave the reader with his [or her] own obsession – to read more of the poetry of Donne.

Read an excerpt!
Purchase the book!

**********

New Poetry → Sparrow

Sparrow

Calico asleep at her side,
She murmured. Quaked may be the word.
Morning sun aslant, I set down the tray,
And looked at what I love
Most. In this world and any other.

You were restless, I say.
Bad dream. Bad, she repeats. Turns.
Hides, for I was in it. Again.

It is unfair, the tricks the mind plays.
I told her this, my hand in her hair
As the cat, yawning, stretched,
And jumped down.

Her back, in that moment,
Was a wounded sparrow.
So I touched it.
I brought orange juice, I half-whisper.

And what else? What else?

Moving the tray, I get back in bed.
I get next to my own heartbeat.
And eyes that have not yet been open
This day, know, and see
That the air beneath, will be safe.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2007

Splash du Jour: Friday

I want to stand with you on a mountain.
I want to bathe with you in the sea.
I want to lay like this forever.
Until the sky falls down over me.
-- Truly, Madly, Deeply – Savage Garden

Have a great Friday!
******

Ahh... The Dichotomy

I just finished reading it!
Good Granny / Bad Granny.
It’s fabulous.
I, [an old guy] love children’s books.

And as such, I am not sure who will love this book more, the kids being read to, or the adults that are reading it to them!
The latter will be snickering, and alternating between nodding and shaking their heads. The kids will just be giggling.

“Good Granny prepares nourishing lunches of salads and whole wheat bread.”
“Bad Granny orders fried chicken by the bucket, with a side order of fries.”

“Good Granny takes her grandchildren to the mall to shop for educational toys.”
“Bad Granny takes them to the mall and teaches them to max out their parents’ credit cards.”

The above examples are two of my favorites in this new book.
Written by Mary McHugh, and wonderfully illustrated by Patricia Storms.
With each turn of the page, a reader, [or listener] is greeted by a new dichotomy of the ages-old conflict between Good and Evil…. no, not so much “evil” → just bad.
Good to the left ←→ Bad to the right.
And no, not so much “bad” even, as “flawed”.
Or hmmm… delightfully misguided! As so many grannies tend to be.
Let’s face it, it’s the bad grannies that give us the giggle-moments.

In fact, this is perhaps the only downside to this book.
It is sure to engender a two-fold conundrum.
Firstly, kids will wish that their “good” or even half-bad grannies were a bit more badder.
And secondly, “good” or even half-good grannies will be reading and thinking, “You know. That second scenario does sound like a lot more fun!”

“Good Granny takes her children to the science museum and walks them through the giant model of the beating heart.”
“Bad granny takes her grandchildren to Daytona Beach and drives them around the track at 180 miles per hour.”

And as for me?

The old guy?
Well, my chances of ever being a grandparent [good OR bad] are slim to none.
However…
← another book by Mary McHugh might be just the thing for me.



More about Mary.
More about Patricia.

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Poe's theory about the necessity of writing short poems is in accord with the Industrial Revolution. As societies grow, their poems tend to grow shorter. A peasant will listen to interminable epic poems in the village square; the literary man in big cities reads sonnets in his bath.
-- W.H. Auden –

Have a great Thursday!

In light of Auden’s statement, here is my own → shortest poem.

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

When a poem is finished, you can't move anything around in it -- you can't substitute one word for another, you can't change a punctuation mark or a line division or anything sort of phrasing without diminishing the effect to some degree. So in other words, it's language brought to a kind of state of perfection. Obviously there is no such thing as perfection, but as close to it as possible. I think that's one of the tests. Most prose paragraphs you can move things around without diminishing the effects, but a poem--everything is in its place.
-- Ted Kooser --

Have a great Wednesday!

Nicole: Just Because...

For further scientific evidence of why I am convinced she is the Top Rung Of The Evolutionary Ladder,
click → HERE!

********

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Have a great Tuesday!
*********

Splash du Jour: Monday

Chris Neil celebrates his game-winning goal, Nov.10, 2007.

In Grade 3, Neil’s principal asked him what he was going to be when he grew up. “I’m going to play in the NHL,” said Neil.
“Be realistic,” said the principal.
“I’m going to play in the NHL,” said Neil.

Have a great Monday!

New Poem → Blackwing

Blackwing

Poison lies in wait, not about
To fill three trumpets with spit
While someone beats a drum. Not
Quite. It knows to tread softly up
The stone stairs.

And fear as a signal fails the wary
At a point where trust meets what
Love should be. Would be.
Easier to run from a killer than from
One who meant for you to end
Yourself.

There is no rhyme in this tale, yet
You look. Dammit, do not look.
It is not here in what happened
Nor in the poem of it.
No rhythm. No meter.

You know you survived.
Let that be enough for now.
Enough, even as you yet pant.

Hiding your face in your hands,
I urge you to part two fingers.
Friend, the stone steps are silent.

Remember. In the ascension,
You knew it to be an angel.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2007

It's About TIMER

Hey, last night I couldn't take it anymore.
The timer on my stove is busted. It's been busted for about a year.
Now it’s dead.
You know the thing that you set and then it buzzes when whatever is in the oven is appropriately burned?
Yeah, that thing. I killed it.

For about a year it was just buzzing whenever the hell it wanted to. Out of the blue.
I would then just go and turn it off. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would wake up to the buzzing. It got progressively worse, and I began to really have to fiddle with the thing to make it shut up.
There were times when I’d come home from work and the buzzer was blaring and poor Jack was meowing and I'd be thinking like HOW LONG has he had to listen to that damn thing buzzing? All day? Poor Jack. [No wonder he pukes in my shoes all the time.]
A normal person would have called the Superintendent about it, long ago.
A NORMAL person!
But me, I have just put up with it for a century.
And so, last night I was sitting at my desk and all of a sudden → BZZZZZZZZZZ the thing starts buzzing...
I looked over at the stove and said to myself...... "No more!"

I went over and with my bare hands literally RIPPED the entire front face of the stove off, where the clock part lives.
All the wires were exposed and all. At the time I cared NOT how it was all going to be re-assembled, if ever. In this pre-surgery state, the buzzing was even louder. Agonizing.
Frig the anaesthetic.
I opened the kitchen drawer and got the trusty flathead screwdriver and I stabbed the living hell out of the entire buzzing apparatus thing. I stabbed blindly, over and over.
The buzzing sort of stopped and started and stopped with my repeated jabs, so I felt around back there and actually found the actual buzz dealie. It was quivering away, wanting to buzz every time I let go of it.
So, I shoved the screwdriver in there and twisted. It was brutal, yes. Like, I twisted the life out of the thing, bent it straight into hell. But you have no idea the satisfaction. The silence. My God, it's over. So over.
I looked down at Jack. He was nodding in approval of the murder.
And amazingly, the whole shmeer popped right back into the front of the stove.
Like, you would never know what had just gone on!
Popped right back in there, good as new.

***********

Splash du Jour: Friday

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly… the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand.
-- Bertrand Russell --

Have a great Friday!

THE PILLAR$

← Why is this man smiling?

I’ll tell you why!
He’s smiling because he just found out he can buy that mansion that is twice the size of his current mansion!
He’s smiling because his name is Ken Follett, and his 1989 bestseller The Pillars of The Earth has been selected as the next “Oprah Book©”.
For any writer, even one with the stature and sales record of Mr. Follett, that sort of thing has to be earth-shattering. The hearing of such an announcement must be accompanied with that cliché sound of the cash register opening… CHA-CHING.
The news is fresh, Oprah only announcing this yesterday [the 14th]. And now, as I sit in the Starbucks section of Chapters, I can see the area where the new Pillars display has already been set up. And these are right next to his new novel, which [my God, this guy REALLY fell up the stairs this time…] happens to be a SEQUEL to Pillars.
The new one is called World Without End.
I myself have been waiting for this book to come out since the twelfth century, it seems. I have so many other books on my “To Be Read” list that I have not yet gotten to it, but I will.
Thing is, BOTH of Follett’s books are now bestsellers!
Like, without a doubt, they will be #1, and #2 on all lists everywhere, because obviously, those who will be picking up Pillars on the advice of Oprah will see the other book, the new one, and take it along with them up to the cash register!
Nothing this mind-bogglingly colossal has happened since…. well, since Jed Clampett stuck his shovel too far into the ground!
Next thing you know, Pillars will be a movie.
Like House of Sand and Fog. Remember that book? And then the movie?
Well, perhaps you did not know this, but the author, Andre Dubus III, wrote that book while he was living in his car! Then Oprah latched onto it. [The book, not the car.]
Hmmmm…. I wonder how many cars are parked out front of the Dubus estate, nowadays?
I wish Oprah would say something on-air about Bookpuddle©!

One more thing and I’m done. About Ken Follett’s success, with Pillars.
HE DESERVES IT! Or rather, the BOOK deserves a greater audience.
This book is flat out, one of the best books I have ever read in my life.
I will not go on about how much I love it. If you have a hankering to hear more about what I think of The Pillars, click → HERE.
In Oprah’s words, Follett is “a best-selling author that everybody has heard of, but this novel is unlike any of his books he’s known for around the world.”
She’s right. It is totally different than his “thrillers”.
Follet says [on his website], “My publishers were a little nervous about such a very unlikely subject but paradoxically, it is my most popular book.”
Keep smiling, Ken!
Pillars is about to become a whole lot more popular!

***********