SimplyMaggies

I found out yesterday that one of my friends has cancer. It came as a shock since he’s only 30 and I’m still trying to process all this. When you’re that age, you don’t really expect anyone to have serious health issues, much less cancer (but then, do you ever?). It isn’t something you want to hear either.

I can only imagine how hard it must be for him and his family to process the fact that he has lumps in his lymphatic nodes even though he was trying to find out what was wrong with him for months. There is a long battle ahead of him but luckily, the cancer is in early stages so the doctors tell him he has a great chance of beating it and coming out the winner.

It’s hard watching people close to you go through something like this but the worst thing about it is the uncertainty. He’s fiancé (whose quite tiny herself) said that he’d lost so much weight just from staying in the hospital for a few weeks. And the worst of it is still to come…

So I will keep him in my thoughts and pray that when this is all over, he will still be among us and stronger than ever…

Well, I am still reading this amazing book I have recently written about and it engages me so completely I simply cannot think, much less write, about anything else these days. So please bear with me for a few more days my readers (whoever you are out there) and I promise I will write a review of one of the best books I came across in the last few months.

And if that hasn’t caught your attention, let me tell you that picking up that book was one of the best things I could have done for myself lately. However, I have only one word of warning to you- do not attempt to read this novel if you don’t have time to devote to it because you will follow in my footsteps and will find yourselves trying to squeeze a few minutes and a few pages here and there and then stay up late at night reading like a lunatic. Which, of course, will make you absolutely exhausted the next morning…

But do I regret it? Absolutely not! My only wish remains I had a day or two to devote myself to reading so I can find out what happens and ease my wondering mind…

Until next time…

A few days ago, as I was strolling along the library aisles, a book caught my eye. So I picked it up and looked at its back cover (as I always do)… It was a nicely printed cover with old-fashioned letters to give it a certain old-world character… But what followed was, at the least, unexpected.

The cover read:

“My dear and unfortunate successor:
It is with regret that I imagine you, whoever you are, reading the account I must put down here. The regret is partly for myself—because I will surely be at least in trouble, maybe dead, or perhaps worse, if this is in your hands. But my regret is also for you, my yet-unknown friend, because only by someone who needs such vile information will this letter someday be read. If you are not my successor in some other sense, you will soon be my heir—and I feel sorrow at bequeathing to another human being my own, perhaps unbelievable, experience of evil. Why I myself inherited it I don’t know, but I hope to discover that fact, eventually—perhaps in the course of writing to you or perhaps in the course of further events…”

And by the time I finished reading this unusual back cover, I was intrigued and subconsciously at least I knew that I’d have to read this one to find out more. But when I opened the book and saw on the very first page the map of Europe during the Cold War years and my own country leaping out at me, I knew then there was no going back. I had to read this book no matter how big it was (and it seemed quite large in its hard-cover edition).

So I hurried to the front desk, rented it out and couldn’t wait to find a quiet place for me to open its pages and start reading. The ideas regarding the story that were running through my head were many and, to my utter surprise later on, absolutely mistaken. “The Historian” (this is the title of the novel that so caught my attention) is a book of many surprises, of which I will tell you later when I finish reading it. For now, it absorbs me with every chapter read to the point that I really don’t want to put it down. I am somewhere close to the middle and instead of getting some kind of explanations to the many mysteries, the plot only thickens…