Book #8 on my list of favorite novels of all time is . . .

A man pulls up to a traffic light - it's red, and he waits for the signal to change, but it never does because as he is sitting there, waiting, his eyes are taken over by a strange white blindness.

Jose Saramago's book "Blindness" opens with this scene, but the situation only continues to get worse as more and more people in the city go blind. Soon the officials begin isolating those struck blind, hoping that if it is contagious they can stop the spread.

Soon the main characters of the book find themselves quarantined in an old asylum. Food is left for them in the yard, but there are no guards to oversee them, no doctors to help them in their blindness, and the conditions in the asylum quickly begin to deteriorate.

Two camps form - one, led by a lifelong blind man (since he is used to the lack of eyesight he now rules the newly blind) is corrupt and violent, stealing the food and terrorizing the inmates. The other group is led by a woman - for some reason, she never lost her vision.

"Blindness" is very much a Lord of the Flies involving adults - take away all of these luxuries that we currently live with (sight, excess food, comfort, clothing, etc): how would we behave? Would we become animals? Or is there something about us that is different, something that makes us human?

And, perhaps most importantly, how would we see the world, each other, our lives, if all of us were blind? Fighting, Saramago contends, is always a form of blindness . . .

Happy Reading!