is the book I am reading at the moment. I haven’t quite finished it yet, so this is not actually a proper review, except to say that I’m finding it fairly interesting and would recommend it,
When they say "away from it all" this is where they mean
if you like John Irving’s stuff. It takes me months to read books that used to take days, because I pretty much only read on public transportation any more, in 10 minute gulps, when I don’t want to make eye contact with all the scowling, miserable people who seem to seriously resent everybody else’s existence. When I am at home, I am on facebook or reading news on the internet.
The reason I mention the book is that I find the main character – not Owen Meany, but the narrator, Johnny Wheelwright – very like myself in a couple of disturbing ways. Not because he’s a middle aged virgin – I’ve had my fair share of failures with women in the past but I am now a happily married man with two kids. No, it was a comment by one of his friends about how he’d been living in Canada for 20 years but he was still thoroughly American.
I’m like that. I live in the Czech Republic, a beautiful land of forests, rivers, hills, mountains, lakes and ponds, with ancient castles and picturesque villages, a land where the beer is cheap and the women are beautiful, and yet the vast majority of my blogs are bitching about American politics (Johnny Wheelwright, in Toronto in 1987, was constantly infuriated by Ronald Reagan and the New York Times. I am constantly infuriated by pretty much anybody Republican and the New York Times).
It particularly struck me yesterday. I had been given the task of taking my nephew for a walk. He’s 10 months old, he was asleep in the stroller, and everybody knows I like long walks. It was a perfect fit. About 3 kilometers down the road I came up on the sleepy little village of Vesela (which means Joy), it looked just like the still scene at the beginning of a fairy tale, I heard a rooster crowing and thought “Nobody in America ever gets a moment like this.”
Of course, I am going to continue to blog about politics, because that’s just what I do, but maybe I should, occasionally, write something a little bit mellower. Because really, my life is pretty good.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
I think there are a lot of people in the states who could walk 3 kilometers and find a sleepy little town where the rooster is crowing. Inner city dwellers have to go a bit further.
By the way, I liked that book too.