The Book didn’t get here until 1:30 pm Saturday. At the time I was dog sitting and my postal carrier was driving madly around my yard, trying to find the door. I was kind of trapped, because the sliding screen wouldn’t open, and then wouldn’t shut, so I ended up with the mail lady driving her truck through the yard and up to my back door, where I had no way to keep Titus in the house while I retrieved The Book and the rest of the mail.

I assured her he was harmless (despite the fact that there’s a “Beware of Dog” sign at the entrance to the driveway, a remnant of some previous tenant). Explaining to the mail carrier the difference between the front door and the back door while chasing the dog all the way around the house and past both doors was how I spent the first fifteen minutes of my possession of The Book. Not reading.

So I didn’t get to read all day Saturday as planned. In fact, I was still on Chapter One when David and Tammy and all four kids came by to pick up the dog and visit for awhile. D.J. and Dakota wrestled on the carpet, while Aiden was pulling the handle on my recliner and making me go up and down. Kylie was a little shy at first but then turned on the charm and started talking to me. While she was telling me about her haircut, Aiden was telling me about his underwear. It was a trip, trying to keep up my end of both conversations.

In spite of interruptions (pleasant, like the one I just mentioned, and not so pleasant, like some I won’t mention), I got through more than half of The Book Saturday. I had to stop a few times because my eyes got tired, and I had to tear myself away for a full hour to cook and eat dinner, because I didn’t want to freeze the hamburger that’s been sitting in my refrigerator since Thursday. So I made Sloppy Joaquins, from Rachael’s magazine. It was 1:30 am when I quit reading for the night, and only then because the words on the page started swimming around. My mind never wandered, but my eyes let me down.

My revised plan was to finish The Book Sunday, which I did. I finished reading the last page and closed the cover, then looked at the clock and saw it was 11:58 pm. I took some time during the day to watch Eric play baseball, and then he came by to visit for awhile in the evening. As you know, I’m a slow reader, and I figure I read about 50 pages an hour. So it was probably unrealistic to think I could finish it in one day, because that would have meant reading fifteen hours straight. I think I did well to finish it in two days.

From the time The Book arrived until midnight last night, I didn’t have the TV set on, and I never went online. It was kind of liberating, actually, not to be tied to anything electronic. I only wish there were seven more books in the series to look forward to. It’s sad to think the saga is over, but I’ll start again with the first one and read them through with a little more understanding of character motivations and how they’re all connected. That will be fun.