Kobo

"Once, when he had me pinned against a wall, I asked him straight out what had I done to make him dislike me so much; suddenly he relaxed, let me loose and said, 'You're a sissy.  I'm just straightening you out.' He was right, I was a sissy of sorts, and the moment he said it, I realized there was nothing I could do to alter his judgement, other than toughen myself to accept and defend the fact"--"The Thanksgiving Visitor"

I've been making slow, steady progress with my Portuguese translation of The Wizard of Oz on my Kobo reader.  Right now I'm at the point where the Tin Man has just joined the group.  It occurred to me that Charley is Steinbeck's Toto, except that Steinbeck was going from Oz (the New York metropolis) to Kansas (rural America)! I've also started translating "Desiderata" into Portuguese.

I noticed that the Kobo reader offers quite a few free ebooks, especially in Christmas week. Cheapskate that I am, I've been downloading quite a few of them, mostly history and "classic" literature. (Who knows how many of them I'll actually get around to reading?) I actually paid a few dollars for Dee Brown's famous Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a '70s history of the western frontier from the First Nations perspective, and that's a book I've long wanted to read.

I read two more Truman Capote stories in the same book as "A Christmas Memory": "One Christmas" and "A Thanksgiving Visitor." Now I want to read more of his stories, and might even do them in my book club!  I've finished Travels With Charley, and Steinbeck's Cannery Row is next on my list, along with the Lapham's Quarterly special issue about Alexander Hamilton.

On Acorn TV we've started watching a '70s TV miniseries of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with Geraldine McEwan in the Maggie Smith role.  The dialogue is a bit hard to hear.