Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Zendberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir,

but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Well, you know, I hardly miss a book I love. I go out of my way.

And so I have today.

Michael Ondaja is the author most recently of The Cat's Table.

It's available as a vintage paperback now, but we didn't talk when it came out in hardcover,

and I'm in love with the book. The Cats Table is a three-ring circus. It's a book in which

things are going on simultaneously in every ring, in the past, the present, and the future,

and it's full of surprises. It's what I'd call a very generous book. It's not just that you're pulling

rabbits out of a hat. You're pulling your pockets out of your pants until the pockets are

empty. The whole point seems to be this time some kind of full disclosure. Am I right?

I think it became that. I had no idea, of course, when I began the book, what it was going to contain or where it was going to go.

And all I had was the idea of a small boy or an 11-year-old boy getting out of a ship.

And I modeled that on a journey I did take when I was an 11-year-old boy from Sri Lanka to England.

But apart from that entrance into the book, I knew nothing of what was going to happen after that.

Because, in fact, the journey I had taken was one that I blacked out or couldn't remember very well.

...