Lights and tunnels

Arriving back to work after an uneventful semana santa, a colleague gifted me with a golden ticket: the business card of an English-language bookstore in Bogotá. This is going to go a looong way towards reducing the amount of complaining I do around here about having no access to new titles in English.

Authors looks lovely:

As a direct importer of titles from the US, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and South Africa we are delighted to offer terrific prices on any English language titles you may be seeking.

Oddly enough, this has renewed my resolve to make it through the present stack and keep building my Spanish library.

Last Tuesday, A. and I day-tripped it to Barranquilla, where I found Spanish translations of Philip Pullman's Count Karlstein and G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. Today I went on an (incomprehensibly) unsuccessful search for José Eustacio Rivera's La vorágine, but picked up the newly-revised edition of Cien años de soledad (which is selling like the proverbial hotcakes around here) and José Saramago's recent memoir, Las pequeñas memorias. I began the latter this evening and am glowing. His wife, Pilar del Río, translated it from the original Portuguese, and the dedication is hers alone:

A Pilar, que todavía no había nacido,
                      y tanto tardó en llegar.

Things are definitely looking up.

Now. If I could only find an affordable bookcase...