January 2014 was looking pretty dull with no new books coming out so I finished the last Alice Munro book. She is a master of the short story and that is not an easy form to conquer. She was deserving of the Nobel Prize.I wish I could write just one short story with such mastery. So simple and so pure.

In February, I made some discoveries. A new book was published (well, the translation was published) by Leonardo Padura, a Cuban writer I had never read before. (All of his books are available in the original Spanish) The book is titled The Man Who Loved Dogs and deals with the last years of the man who killed Trotsky here in Mexico. I did not know that he spent his last few years in Cuba where he died. But, I couldn't get the book so I decided to read some of his earlier works to get a feel for his writing. He has written a series about a Havana detective. I started with Havana Gold. I discovered that contrary to the beliefs that I held about Cuba, there are cars in Cuba and upper-middle-class areas and pure-bred dogs. I also discovered that, like most of my Cuban friends, Cubans tend to be rather long-winded and self-torturing. However, the writing is better than good and the man has an excellent translator who manages to keep the Cuban touch while passing the book over to English. I now have my hands on The Man Who Loved Dogs but fate has intervened in the form of Ripper by Isabel Allende who has decided to write her first crime novel. I am tossing a coin to see which one will be read first.