Those who rush to dismiss Scottish novelist Alexander McCall Smith probably do so precisely because they're rushing. The pleasures to be found in his several ongoing series””notably the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency””come through the books' very slowness. Hunger for flash and you're missing the point.

That said, the prolific author is certainly no slouch at the keyboard. There's the No. 1 series (latest: Blue Shoes and Happiness [Knopf Canada, $29.95]). Plus, he's forging ahead with his Sunday Philosophy Club series (The Right Attitude to Rain [Knopf Canada, $29.95] is just out) and his 44 Scotland Street series (Espresso Tales [Vintage Canada, $21]). Let's not forget his three series for young children, and now””on top of all that””Dream Angus: The Celtic God of Dreams (Knopf Canada, $25), one of the titles in Canongate Books' Myths series, authored by 100 contemporary writers from around the world.

“I found it a very interesting exercise, engaging with myth,” he says on the phone from Toronto, where he's barely unpacked his much-used travel bag. “Myth as we would conventionally define it or see it doesn't play a great part in people's lives today.” Having just completed a 12-city, 14-day tour of the United States (where he's twice lived), he is conscious of a different kind of myth at work in modern America: “The way in which they treat their celebrities””their so-called celebrities””is positively reminiscent of the way in which people in an earlier age thought of the Olympian figures. You know, I think it's the same sort of thing, these gods and goddesses who are given almost deified status. And their dramas, their little affairs, their activities are watched in the same way as I think people would have thought about the gods in the past.”

Two of Dream Angus's 10 chapter-tales are set in Canada, he points out, though “you have to be very careful, I think, about where you write about because you can get it very wrong.” McCall Smith shouldn't worry about getting Canada wrong, though: he's been visiting two of his sisters in West Vancouver for two decades; this spring he was given an honorary degree from UBC (“which I was very, very proud of”); and he bought a yacht for when he's not working on the No. 1 novels he usually finishes here. (The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, completed here last month, is due out next April.) “A proper yacht,” he enthuses, noting, though, that he's not brave enough to go past Bowen Island. “It's even got radar. Haven't you always wanted radar? I remember as a boy longing for a radar set, so now I've got radar.”

All this aside, we're meant to be discussing Right Attitude to Rain, a genial romantic novel featuring lay philosopher Isabel Dalhousie. Like many of his novels, it celebrates the sharing of food, which “provides the ideal milieu for an exchange of ideas,” he explains, “in that there's an intimacy....a sort of womblike comfort.”

Intimacy, companionship, conversation””these are slow pleasures he sees as “becoming more and more beleaguered” in modern times. Yet slow or not, they are pleasures that have quickly found an enormous audience.