Books So yesterday we took a field trip to the Secret Bookstore, which I can't tell you much about besides it being Secret, and also a Bookstore, except to reassure you that it is Real, and not a Metaphor - except when it is.  And inevitably I am up on the steps and winnowing out the PKD novels in hardcover, all the ones in the double-, not triple-, digit price range, when our host asks if any of us have read the most recent New Yorker.

Now I don't generally read the New Yorker, not because it isn't good, but because it is, and it's often just too much.  Haven't been reading a lot lately anyhow, and then mostly nonfiction, bingeing on Facts, you know. But the other night having been Working Too Much and needing to get away from interwebs 2.0 and do something non-interactive, and involving a couch, I picked up the New Yorker and decided on kind of a whim to read the fiction piece for once.  It didn't hurt that it was by one of us.  So I'm reading along and this perfectly acceptable story slowly and wonderfully morphs into this totally amazing story about a dog, a pit bull, about its heart and soul and immense physicality, and it is True and Funny and not at all sentimental, and I am absolutely captivated.  It reminds me of Beryl Markham's dog Buller, it reminds me of my brother's dog Clancy, but it mostly just brings another being to vivid life - on the page, in my mind, and in the world.

So back in the Secret Bookstore, our host continues, " . . . because this week I am IN it.  Well not exactly me but - my DOG."

It was HIS DOG. 

A little later I gather up my PKD and a graphic novel treatment of Neuromancer and am saying my goodbye's, and our host promises that next time, I can meet Ava.

Read here: Ava's Apartment, by Jonathan Lethem.  An excerpt from a novel due out this fall.