Penitentiary Reading

Taking cue from Joseph Pearce:

You've just been put in jail in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico for not having your official "papers." The guard allows you one book. Which one do you take?

If you're Dallas senior Benny Barrett, you take G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy and swat mosquitoes in between chapters.

...

Barrett said he and Itegboje passed the time making small talk in pidgin Spanish with the Hondurans who were intercepted as they were trying to make it into the U.S. and reading the books the guard allowed them to take.

...

Barrett said that in a Mexican jail, time takes on an entirely new form.

"Seconds turned into the rhythmic snoring of the Iranian sleeping below me," he said. "Minutes became the paragraphs I read in my book."

from today's Baylor University newspaper