The narrator is one of the Midnight’s Children, a child born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the day of India’s independence. These thousand babes grow to earn supernatural powers. The narrator can read thoughts, which accounts for much of his storytelling, and he assembles the thousand children into a kind of telepathic congress. He’s not alone — his “twin” has supernatural knees. Yes, knees, between which he can crush and kill.

The twin is actually a family friend, but there’s a critical twist. An English nursemaid switches the two boys at birth, and the narrator himself is born a bastard of a renegade Englishman and his servant Indian mother. But, because of the switch, he’s raised instead in a wealthy family of unusual characters. Meanwhile, the other boy grows in the poor family and becomes a violent killer then war hero, all hinted at a distance through the narrator’s tales.

That narrator is an untrustworthy fellow. He is — or claims to be — the catalyst of so many of the affairs and deaths and dramas surrounding him. The narrator often refuses to admit his responsibility, or to downplay his involvement. The effects are often tragic.

What his story crafts amid the web of magical realism and shady retelling is a strange and sometimes beautiful menagerie of tales that stab at the heart of India in the modern world. It’s not a subject I know much about, but Rushdie brings alive India of the 1950s and 1960s in personal detail, from the toothpaste brands to the wars in Kashmir. Mumbai in particular percolates with color and colorful characters.

It’s a challenging book, dense in its sometimes feverish prose and thick with layers of filtered tales. The book trails off into oblivion as modern India — and it’s pickled curries — grow beyond the reach of the narrator’s arms. He falls apart, literally, and the reader realizes there’s one thing he didn’t lie about: “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”

Midnight’s Children: A-

I got used to the warmth, actually. Seven days in the Carribbean will do that, extreme sunburn or not! We spent St. Patty’s day drinking with the Irish, and days after slurping down enough rum to make us forget the sunscreen. Somehow, along the way, I managed to shed enough stress to actually look forward to coming back.

Back home now, things are mostly the same. Still no movement on any moving, which is to say that our real estate saga continues.

Canada gets all the good stuff! She’s just wrapping up her master’s degree; next weekend is her final class. And, just yesterday she received the work transfer she requested to return teaching at the city’s academy high school. She’s thrilled, and I’m proud.

For years, I’ve been so busily distracted on a number of personal projects that I’ve neglected reading. But, I’m happy to say I’ve been reading a lot lately. I read Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons (A-), which is a wonderfully troubling book, despite appearances to the contrary. I also read John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (C+), which was a quick and dirty read, and that about sums up it’s quality, too. Entertaining, but not terribly so.

I’ve got a stack of ten books, and my goal is to read all of them before year’s end. Given my slow pace, that may be quite a feat! I snuck in the Scalzi book as well as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. But, otherwise, the books are:

• Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier (Read! A-)
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (Read! B+)
• The Road by Cormac MacCarthy (Read: A-)
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (Read! A-)
• White Noise by Don Delillo (Read! C+)
• The Wizard by Gene Wolfe
• Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides
• Snow by Orhan Pamuk
• Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
• Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

I’ve also got The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester sitting around somewhere. The rest of my (many) books are packed away for a move that never happened. I can always unpack them and come up with several more lists of ten!

Edited to add November 13, 2007:
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (Read! A)

Edited to add September 5, 2008:
A Gentleman’s Game by Greg Rucka (Read! A)
Private Wars by Greg Rucka (Read! B-)
Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Read! B+, No blog review)
The Alchemist by Paul Coelho (Read! D)
White Noise by Don Delillo (Read! C+)

Edited to add October 14, 2008:
On Writing by Stephen King (Read! B+, No blog review)
The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Read! B-)