stories

Oh my days, there are so many good books in this world. Kobo often has discounts on random lists of books, which is how I found this one. It's by a Nigerian author, attempting to tell the story of a Nigerian email scammer but from their point of view. And I love the cover. I had to buy.

In other book news, I want to share with you some passages from the sheep mystery (Three Bags Full).

This bit made me think what a funny Babe-type movie you could make of this book--there's a perfect movie-type visual humour in this scene. Two women are sitting around talking, and the sheep are eavesdropping, trying to get clues:

As if they heard a sound, they [the two women] both turned their heads to the beautiful sunset sky above the sea. For safety's sake, the sheep looked the same way, but they couldn't see anything special.

In this scene the sheep are eavesdropping on a man and woman in their dead shepherd's caravan. For context--their shepherd used to read sappy romance novels to the sheep, usually with a heroine called Pamela. So the sheep often refer to the Pamela books when trying to understand human behaviour. And they LOVE having stories told to them:

"I could tell you stories. Like Scheherezade in the Thousand and One Nights."
"I wasn't really planning to stay quite that long," said the man. "On the other hand..."
Silence billowed out of the window of the shepherd's caravan, dense and heavy as hot breath. The sheep looked at one another. Perhaps it was getting interesting in there after all. As if at a signal, Maude and Heather started bleating. "Stories!" they bleated. "Stories!"
It was some time before Miss Maple had restored peace and quiet. "Even if they are telling stories in there," she said, "how do you expect to hear them if you're kicking up such a racket?"
But the sheep didn't get to hear any stories. No more was said inside the caravan. The sheep were not surprised: they were familiar with the situation from the Pamela novels. When the mysterious stranger--and without a shadow of a doubt, they had one of those here--was left alone with a woman you could expect the story to trail off into nothing. The man and the woman stopped talking at some point, and that was the end of the chapter. You never found out what happened next. It was a mystery to the sheep, because something had to happen. Human beings didn't simply disappear. Usually they turned up again in the next chapter, alive and well. All the same, there were these gaps in the stories.