Lifting the Tortilla Curtain.

I believe books have a "time," or perhaps we have a time to read books.

In light of Arizona's recent anti-immigration legislation, I picked up a copy of T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain.

It's a book I've tried to read on more than one occasion. Now, I can't put it down. It has as much--if not more--resonance--than when it was written in 1995.

The story is immediately absorbing and the writing itself is dynamic:

The man was Mexican, Hispanic, that's what he was, and he was speaking Spanish, a hot crazed drumroll of a language to which Delaney's four years of high-school French gave him little access.