The first order of business today is to wish a very happy birthday to Claire Bea, and an equally happy birthday to my cousin Mike. Having one's birthday fall on Good Friday can be inconvenient, so I trust that both of them will allow celebrations to continue well into the coming week.
Dizzy is doing very much better this morning, in part because we ratcheted up his pain medication yesterday. Dogs are famously resilient, and Dizzy should be better on his own by the time this prescription runs out -- but it did make me wonder whether dogs become addicted the way humans do, and how that happens, and what that looks like.
Every animal species seeks out opportunities to become intoxicated. Bears choose to eat fermented berries when fresh ones are available; my friend Jennifer Jordan recently posted this set of photos of a group of gorillas that overindulged in fermented bamboo.
So I'm wondering: when this Tramadol prescription runs out, will Dizzy miss it? Would he hang out on street corners and compromise his moral principles in order to get more? (Not that I would let him.)
What I Read This Week
Michael Marshall, THE INTRUDERS. This creepy thriller belongs on the shelf among Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Rosemary's Baby, and the collected works of Philip K. Dick. Author Jack Whalen, a former L.A. police officer, moves to Washington state with his wife Amy; on a business trip to Seattle, Amy disappears for two days. She returns as if nothing had been wrong, but is somehow ... different.
Charles Dickens, BLEAK HOUSE. I've been listening to this on audiobook for the last month or so; the recording's 37 hours long. I had first read this book the summer after I finished college, and saw it as the tragedy of Lady Dedlock; ten years later, I returned to it and read it as the tragedy of Ada and Richard; this time around, it seemed to me to be a book about the triumph of family love. This confirms my belief that we should revisit some books at different stages of our lives, and I wonder what I'll find when I read it again ten years from now.
Leslie S. Klinger, THE ANNOTATED DRACULA BY BRAM STOKER. Dracula is the book under discussion at John Connolly's online book club this month, and I've been reading this book since late last year; it is an extraordinary treasure chest for fans of the book, a true labor of love full of curiosities. Anyone interested in Victorian England, the history of horror novels, or old Hollywood will find something to love about this book. Because it is so thorough and distracting, however, people new to Dracula should read the non-annotated version first.
1 comment:
Glad Dizzy is recovering. Forgive my repetitiveness, you know how much I love Bleak House, and it contains perhaps my favorite sentence ever written:
"The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world."
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