Since my teaching duties have ended, I’ve been voraciously reading everything I can get my little paws on. Seriously. The card that’s burning a hole in my wallet more than others these days is my public library card. If I wasn’t such a bibliophile, I may just have cause enough to be embarrassed!

It brings back all these wonderful memories of heading to my local library as a kid, running ahead of my mother and slipping into the cool air conditioned shelves containing treasures which could take me anywhere I wanted to go.

So, it didn’t surprise me in the least that the first stop I made after I turned in my grades was to the Missoula Public Library to begin reading all the books I wanted to all semester but didn’t have time for.

Last Thanksgiving, I traversed through a bookstore with an old friend of mine, passing book titles and authors to each other. At the time, he suggested I read a book entitled Blindness by Jose Saramago. “It’ll blow you away”, he said.

I was intrigued but wasn’t sure if I was up for a story dealing with baser human elements and tragedy. So, I put it off…until now.

I read it…no, devoured it, in a day! The book’s landscape was utterly powerful and disturbing. I cringed through sections, felt nauseated through others, and sadly smiled at still other passages in the book.

Saramago’s characters are bold, fresh and somehoew familiar. I urge you all to find this book and read it, not because it’s good but because it reveals the soft underbelly of human nature. The shadow side…a side that we glimpse from time to time but politely ignore. Though written in 1995, I couldn’t help but think about New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or Berlin in the days following its fall to the Russians in 1945.

I won’t say more than this, but by the book’s end, I can promise you that you will want to pass it off to every other person you know.

Saramago: he’s entirely worth knowing!