Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal. You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today I'm very happy to have us my guest, Carlos Ruiz Afon, the author most recently of The Angels

Game. It's published by Doubleday. He's the author as well of the immensely

popular The Shadow of the Wind, and this book is in a sense a predecessor to the Shadow of the Wind

in that one of the major characters in the shadow of the wind is born

just as the angel's game concludes, though the books don't really need to be read together.

They can be read entirely separately.

Once again, the author strikes one as being

a kind of Magus figure, a magician. And I'm curious, for you, that writing wizard, who is he? Where does he come from?

Well, I don't know, to me, the writing thing, the writing bug or whatever that is that resides in my brain comes from as far as I can't remember.

Everything I've always done has been to make up stories and tell them. I remember since there was a child, what I've been doing.

Even before I could learn to read and write, I was kind of making up stories, character, worlds.

And so as soon as I could get them on paper, I'd started doing so.

So this is what I've always been doing.

I've been always being fascinated by storytelling,

by a language, about all these codes, all these things that you can use to tell stories,

to communicate ideas, to explore the world of the mind.

And so I guess in many ways I had no choice.

I was born like this.

...