Why do you loan me such sad books?

I've also finished reading The Waiting Years which Venerable loaned me. I can't believe how sad the ending was - I had tears in my eyes. Mind you, I also have a dvd copy of Watership Down that I have never watched because it makes me cry.

I also finished reading Cabal by Michael Dibdin. This is the first Aurelio Zen book that I've read and it was very entertaining. I felt that the writer was trying just a little too hard though. Everything was a bit overly described - "The streets were lined wiht small Fiats parked nose to tail like giant cockroaches, but there was no one about except a few youths on scooters." Very poetic, but in my experience, and we have enormous cockroaches in Queensland, cockroaches do not stand patiently in line "nose to tail". For starters, they don't have tails and secondly, they tend to do a lot of scuttling. Perhaps if all the cars ran all over the road at night in a chaotic fashion and then, as soon as the streetlights came on, they tried to hide in the basements of the buildings - then they could be described as being like cockroaches.

Now I feel positively squeamish.