anja

I just finished In Watermelon Sugar, by Richard Brautigan. It was lovely, though it ended sombrely. As I was reading the last few pages, my cat camped out on my chest. She was purring very loudly, and her wiskers were tickling my face. Our noses were about an inch apart, and I was trying to read between her ears from the book which I was holding on her back. As I finished it, she fell asleep. Since her claws were perilously close to (two layers of cloth away from) my nipple, and even though one of her wiskers was up my nose, I put my book down and stayed for a while. I just sat there and tried to pet her and Mike, who was asleep by my side, at the same time without pissing either off. Here is an excerpt from In Watermelon Sugar:

"After Fred left it felt good to get back to writing again, to dip my pen in watermelonseed ink and write upon these sheets of sweet-smelling wood made by Bill down at the shingle factory.
Here is a list of the things that I will tell you about in this book. There's no use saving it until later. I might as well tell you now where your're at -
1: iDEATH. (A good place.)
2: Charley (My friend.)
3: The tigers and how they lived and how beautiful they were and how they died and how they talked to me while they ate my parents, and how I talked back to them and how they stopped eating my parents, though it did not help my parents any, nothing could help them by then, and we talked for a long time and one of the tigers helped me with my arithmetic, then they told me to go away while they finished eating my parents, and I went away. I returned later that night to burn the shack down. That's what we did in those days."