Adam as an Add-on

My reading has been eccentric, sometimes bitty, always unpredictable in my reaction to it. This is in recent months, and that has been the period when reading has unavoidably represented my main recreational option. A sort of reader’s block has been, I hope, dispelled by discovering “Outlaw”, the first of Angus Donald’s Robin Hood-related sequence. A brutal, unsentimental but absorbing interpretation of a much visited group of characters and their situation.

I resumed my long ago habit of reading in bed before turning the light out, and while I had the Donald book, was fighting sleepiness to continue a litle longer. One night I just wouldn’t stop reading while Alan, the narrator, and his friends were menaced and trapped by wolves. Robin and the outlaw band rescued them, and I was able to call it a night. Not before my tired brain had developed the story in various strange ways which I had to correct — “No, that’s what I’m dreaming, not what I’m reading.”

A couple of nights later, Alan was entrusted with liaising between two set of Robin’s fighters in the build-up to the climactic battle. On his way to seek the force concealed in the forest, he passed the garden of Eden and was greeted and well-wished by Adam and Eve. “No, Roger. That’s a dream. Focus on the book.”

That’s the only dream diversion whose actual content I remember. But my determined bedtime adherence to a splendid read has reminded me of the meaning of phrases like “page turner” and “un-put-downable.”

Hoping the next book is as good.