I’m trying to read Veronika Decide Morir (trans: Veronika Decides to Die) in Spanish right now. It’s quite difficult because I haven’t practiced my Spanish in almost three years. I’m a little less than a hundred pages into it, but it’s taken me almost 4 hours of reading and looking up words.

Anyway, in the book he tells a story about a king of a kingdom and the sorcerer who attempts to ruin him. The sorcerer poisons the water source in the kingdom to drive people to madness. The king, on the other hand, drinks from a private water source. Things go according to plan and the people go crazy. The king, trying to stop the madness, tries to take security measures, but everyone thinks he’s the crazy one. In the end, in order to rule, he ends up drinking from the poisoned water source himself. Once he is like everyone else, they believe he has regained his sanity. And, in this secluded kingdom, the crazy king and all the crazy people lived happily ever after.

I liked this story. It leads me to believe Paulo Coelho knows what it’s like to do group projects.