I cried all through the last few pages of A Prayer For Owen Meany last night.

It's stupidly hard to read a book when you are crying.

Stupidly hard.

And it's not like John Irving doesn't warn you that something terrible is going to happen to Owen, because once he gets you attached to Owen he practically showers you with streamers that say "Owen's Going to Croak" "Owen is Toast" "Sayonara Little Guy" but when it happens it's just so devastating that it STILL made me cry.

But then again, I always cry at the scene in Miracle on 34th St. when they bring the bags of mail in to Kris Kringle and I've seen that old black and white movie maybe 10,000 times so you may not want to use me as any sort of water gauge.

The library in our village had a book sale about a month ago and I stocked up on a baker's dozen of books, A Prayer For Owen Meaning being one of them. I promised myself that they were for the winter when I couldn't work outside in the garden, but I've already pigged down three.

Oh yes, I'm all about the delayed gratification.

The Ash Garden, which is a highly touted bit of Canadian fiction involving the intersecting lives of a Hiroshima victim and a man who worked on the bomb, was good but not great. The ending just didn't work for me, but that's me.

I bought an "Oprah" book called A Virtuous Woman because I'm curious to see what Oprah is pushing and if this is any indication then it's high class romance novels. An easy read, for sure.

I almost didn't buy A Prayer For Owen Meany because I'm kind of lukewarm about John Irving. But it was only a buck, my neighbour Gail has been raving about this book forever and I enjoyed another of his books called A Widow For One Year so I figured I didn't have anything to lose.

All I can say without spoiling it (Have I mentioned that Owen is deaded? Just checking.) is that I couldn't put this book down.

I am tired from staying up much too late for three nights running. I'm sad from that letdown you feel when a terrifically good book ends and you realize the ride is over. In parts of the book I knew I was being manipulated and I didn't care.

Yes, I let John Irving have his way with me for three nights running and now it's over.