Mario Vargas Llosa wins the Nobel Prize for literature. Yay, even though I have a soft spot in my heart for Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, and Margaret Atwood but then I’m kind of parochial that way. And, yes, I know Atwood is one of those northern furriner-types.

During my brief time as a college student (hardly more than a cameo appearance) I took two South American literature classes and Vargas Llosa was well represented in both along with the usual suspects: Garcia Marquez, Paz, Fuentes, personal favorite Julio Cortázar (see Hopscotch) and the Godfather of them all, Jorge Luis Borges.  Less experimental than the others, Vargas Llosa is eminently readable but no less brilliant.  Personal favorite is The War of The End of the World which is epic in a Tolstoyian sense and, much like my all time favorite  novel, The Origin of the Brunists, which I have mentioned here many many times, War describes the eternal war between the earthly and the apocalyptically inclined. Kind of like Waco writ large. Well worth the time (both of them) if you’re looking for a big meaty book to sink into on a winters night… which is also a plug for this.

Also, Roy covers those who see politics and who, upon seeing a suspicious looking acronym float to the top of their alphabet soup, prefer to wrinkle their noses and then throw the whole bowl away.

Better dead and unfed than read.