must read

I just finished reading the most lovely book and I just had to share.  I'm not one for remembering titles so unfortunately lists of must read books and friendly recommendations often tumble from my brain when I get to the library.  Luckily, Vista has some awesome, on top of it librarians who will select their own ideas of must reads and prominently display them for those of us types who surely do choose a book by its cover.

The book is The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna.  Not a new book, it was published in 1975.  But one of those universal truths kind of books that hits you in the gut with a 'yes, that's exactly how I experience the world' kind of feeling.  The author of the forward to the edition I read, Pico Iyer, expressed it beautifully:

There are many ways of catching this carpe-diem spirit and the liberation that comes from waking up to one's limits (and therefore one's possibilities), and philosophers for centuries have expounded sonorously on these themes.  I love The Year of the Hare for not taking anything too seriously (least of all itself) and for sounding, in its freedom from received ideas of what is and isn't important, a bracing declaration of independence for the enlightened truant inside each one of us. 

First grade book summary: Man leaves job, wife, house, 'life' as he knows it to befriend a hare.  Finds his real life in the meantime.

On to find my real life in the slowly melting days of summer...