Sat down and read "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" by Salman Rushdie over the weekend. It ate up the bulk of my weekend, and I enjoyed every moment of it. Rushdie's magical realism, his liberal borrowing of Joyce, Falkner et. al, his eloquent descriptions and the story, the story moved the hell out of me.

I liked his twists and tweaks on the world we know, the retelling and expansion of the Orpheus myth. I liked the knowledge Rushdie imparted, and how he utilized Checkov's rule of the gun.

If you're not a creative writing workshop survivor, they beat Checkov's rule into your skull from day one, which leaves a girl with the unfortunate prediliction of waiting for introductions in the first act to circle back by the end of the fifth (or third, if we're not doing "Hamlet") act. It was nice of Rushdie to weave even little threads of detail from the begining of the story into the later tapestry, thus giving the novel a richer texture.

Yeah, did I mention I was a creative writing workshop survivor?

This is the first of Rushdie I've read, though the famous fatwa left an indelible impression on me when I was a kid. I remember thinking to myself, "Damn! People want to kill this guy over a book! A book! I gotta get me a piece of that action."

During the uproar, I found a copy of "The Santanic Verses" in an airport bookseller's and looked at the first page and the last page to try to gauge why people wanted him dead. I remember not making heads nor tails of it and, at any rate being shooed off by the clerk who didn't want a kid's grimy fingerprints smudging up the merchandise.

It's next on my list.