What I’m Reading – Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

I first read this book about thirty years ago, and if it hadn’t been for the rather trivial fact that I was unemployed at the time, had a lot of time on my hands, and worse, I was snowbound, I’d would probably have never picked it up.

I am very glad that circumstances dictated otherwise.  I started reading it at eight in the morning over coffee, and I couldn’t put it down. The magical spell of that book is incredible because Anaya places the book solidly in the land I’m familiar with. I’ve been in towns very much like he described, and I could smell the adobe the homes were built of. I could easily walk the small streams he described. And I’ve known the gentle people who live in his novel. Their suntanned faces and voices I’m familiar with.

He places the book in an age between the old and the new. In a simple world where the magic and mystery of the old ways are being replaced with science and logic. Where the world is expanding to beyond the horizon. Toss a small boy right into the middle of it who is desperately trying to understand the new while confronted with the truth of the old, and you’ve a recipe for a first rate story.

So thirty years later, I found that tattered old copy which I’ve read probably a dozen times, and once again I drifted into the magic of the old world I’d known as a child. And for at least a little while, I was six again, and the universe spread before me like a mystery waiting to be unwrapped.

I hope someday you’ll read it and be carried away in it like I’ve been.

Enjoy!