(Grrr. Sometimes LJ really annoys me. But it's not really LJs fault so much as it is mine -- as arouette once wrote in one of our Riptide fics, 'the problem is not with the computer, it's the loose nut in front of the keyboard.' So now I am going to re-write this post in WordPad and copy and paste it into LJ.)

On to the reviews:

Book #41 was a difficult book to read. I'm not sure if it was because it was originally written in Portugese and later translated into English (that might explain some of the differences between this novel's lack of punctuation and lack of attributing dialogue to the person who is speaking), or if it's the difficult, frightening and disgusting (in ways that Stephen King would be proud of) things that happen in the story.

"Blindness" by Jose Saramago is the story of how an unidentified country is beset by a plague of "white blindness" (or "the white evil") -- people go blind suddenly and without warning, but instead of seeing only blackness, they see only a misty, milky white. The government quickly takes control by rounding up the people who have gone blind, as well as people who've been in close contact with them and are therefore likely to soon become blind themselves, and putting them in a vacant building once used as a mental hospital.

Among the first people to go blind is an opthalmologist, and when he is taken away by the government, his wife tells them that she is blind, too, so she can go with him, in order to help and protect him.

Soldiers are on guard outside the hospital to keep any of the blind from escaping, and chaos quickly descends inside with only one person able to see what is going on and try to keep things under control without allowing any of the other inmates from discovering that she can see.

Both the style of writing and the horrific circumstances remind me of "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, and I think anyone who has read and enjoys his books would be interested in reading this one as well.

Here's an example of why this was so frustrating to read and why it took me so long:

But are you really blind, he asked, Totally blind, In any case, it might be a coincidence, there might not really have been, in the strict sense of the word, any contagion whatsoever, Agreed there is no proof of contagion, but this was not just a case of his turning blind and my turning blind, each of us in our own home, without our having seen each other, the man turned up blind at the surgery and I went blind a few hours later, How can we trace this man, I have his name and address on file in the surgery, I'll send someone there immediately, A doctor, Yes, of course, a colleague, Don't you think we ought to inform the Ministry about what is happening, For the moment that would be premature, think of the public alarm news of this kind would provoke, good grief, blindness isn't catching, Death isn't catching either, yet nevertheless we all die,

(I would keep writing, but this goes on for a lot longer before we hit a period again. You get the idea.)

Book #42 was oddly enough, also takes place in another county (England) and intriguingly disabled character(s). "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" by Mark Haddon is a story told by Christopher, a teenager (15 or so) who is somewhere on the autistim spectrum, possibly Asperger's. Someone has killed the neighbor's dog, and he decides that this is a mystery that needs to be solved and he would like to write a book in which he solves it.

He has certain routines that must be followed so that he is able to feel secure, and in this book he both describes and explains why he must have things set up in this way *and* as the story progresses, discovers that he can survive some changes in his life.

Just in the last few days, I've recommended this book to two women I know who have sons on the autism spectrum, but I would also happily recommend it for *anyone*, whether you know a person who has autism or not.