What better way to start a blog than by talking about the book one is reading? I hope none.
Nicholas Christopher came into my life when my dear friend, Martin Joseph Quinn, gave me A Trip to the Stars. The magical realism of Christopher’s prose transported me just like Garcia Marquez himself. Quinn may be gone, where I don’t know (but darling, I love you so.) And so Nicholas’ new book, The Bestiary, jumped into my arms at the new fiction section of my Oakland Public Library at Rockridge. It has a spiritual intellectual quest at the center of its plot, with the narrative from a young man seeking a holy grail in a book of cross-species animalia. And it crisscrosses the world and its cultures to find it.
The power and beauty of animals, as spirit guides and as forces of god’s nature, sometimes overwhelms me. I want to honor the words of another Bay Area believer, who spoke her peace on NPR’s Perspectives, found at: http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R801250737.
