Visits

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Creepy Books and Things

It's not that there's nothing to say. It's just that I'm lazy. But anyway ....

Just finished reading Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King. Quite a good book. I'd been hoping for years that he would one day write a sequel to The Shining, and, finally, he did. And did so very well. It's not quite as scary as The Shining, but maybe that's a good thing. I remember The Shining giving me nightmares, way back when. This one I read in English, which was also a bit of a treat. When you read in a foreign language (like Indonesian), there is an unfortunate barrier between the reader and the book. You cannot simply ride the current, but must continually apply another part of your mind to translation. So, you end up distanced from the story, overly aware of the words and sentences. It was also a treat because books in English here tend to be ridiculously expensive, whereas books in Indonesian are cheap. I got the book at PeriPlus, and the price was not actually that bad, as these things go. Rp. 100.000. Nonetheless, a book in Indonesian will cost half this amount (while most books in English will cost 2-4 times this amount).

So, it's off to Gramedia in another hour or so to look for a new book, in Indonesian. I most recently read the Divergent Trilogy, which was enjoyable and fairly easy to read (being geared to young audiences).

I forgot to mention the snake on our kitchen sink the other day. Creepy, like a Stephen King book. It was about 3 feet long, I reckon, and gray. It seems to have come from a hole in the wall, into which it returned after we poked it a few times. I stopped up the hole, but who knows? I suppose they can slither through lots of fissures. In any case, that was perhaps a week ago, and we've not seen it since.

No comments: