Our National Office is closed because of the snow in Toronto. Half of my office is locked away in private rooms being trained. The other half of my office is too busy with their work to bother me. I have been just SO darn productive today, it’s not even funny. Or maybe I’m just humbled.

I finished “Neverness” last night. It was epic.

Karin bought me the book — hunted it down used from Amazon.com at “great expense” — last year as a gift. I have been picking at it. It is the first of four books in series called “A Requiem for Homo Sapiens” that I have been reading forever. “Neverness” is a prequel of sorts — a prequel to the trilogy that follows. I picked up the first book — “The Broken God” — about eleven years ago in a bookstore long-since-gone out of business in downtown Red Deer. I was just going into grade twelve, and it took me a year to pick through the thickscapes and deep philosophical musings. It’s sequel — “The Wild” — arrived a few years later. I worked through that one in College. The last book — “War in Heaven” — appeared while I was in University, and I trudged waist deep along it’s pages for four long semesters, savouring it because I knew it would be the last one.

And then there was “Neverness”…

I began it a few months ago, and then last night, sitting in my big green comfy chair, a cup of orange spiced tea in one hand, I read the last chapter. And it was done.

I spent more than a decade with that story. Long, it might seem. Slow, some might say. And last night I finished. It is sad, almost, and maybe when I have cleared my long list of unfinished books from my memory I will start fresh and plough through Zindell’s magnificent universe once more, rich in a tapestry of philosophy, spirituality, and a glorious and infinite perspective of humanity.

[a deep breath -- it is yoga for the soul]

Would I recommend the books? No. (They’re mine, and you can’t have them!) If you were to read them, they would destroy you. Your mind would be carked into something entirely different than it is now, and though you might understand a little more deeply why I am as perplexed and broken as I am, it is not a mental journey anyone should take at the recommendation of another — especially me. You need to find that path on your own.

So go read your Oprah recommendations. Read some King, or Grisham, or McGraw. And let me keep mine, and simply mark this moment for what it’s worth.