books

Things timed out well with my consulting clients this year, and I was able to take the ten days or so around Christmas and New Year's off (almost completely - there were a few bits of work to attend to, but not much, thank goodness).

I really, really enjoyed reading Sue Hubbell's A Book of Bees, so I picked up A Country Year at the library.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through - partway into the "Winter" chapter - and I keep putting off reading more, because I don't want it to end.

Sue is such a lovely writer. Her voice is at once no-nonsense and filled with awe and delighted humility at the wonders of the natural world around her.

Last weekend was was one of my personal holidays - the annual Big Book Sale put on by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.

I like to go on the final Sunday, which is dollar day - every book is a buck.

Past years, I've sometimes hovered around the $200 mark, which is a lot of books if you live in an already-book-filled apartment.

Wow - I am really enjoying this book.

I've been a fan of Andy Hertzfeld since the early days of the Macintosh, and it's great to see the roles he plays in this story, and to get acquainted with Mitch Kapor, someone I hadn't known much about. (I love that Lotus was named for the lotus plant, a nod toward Buddhism.)

I've developed a lovely evening ritual.

Before falling asleep, I read

• a Billy Collins poem (I'm reading through my six Billy Collins books, in order)
• another poem or two (currently from the Garrison Keillor Good Poems anthology; I'm not a huge Keillor fan, but I like this collection)
• a short piece of prose (right now, that's a chapter from The Flight of the Iguana, which I am really enjoying)

I am a huge Tom Stoppard fan. I can't wait for the day I get to see all three parts of Coast of Utopia. (I have the published plays - they're wonderful.) I've seen Arcadia four times. I love re-reading his work.

So I was really looking forward to Ira Nadel's Tom Stoppard: A Life.

This was a fast read.

Somehow the marketing - probably more for the movie than the book - led me to expect something funnier. The official Amazon review gets it right - "harrowing" is more like it. There were certainly some funny moments, and some wonderful turns of phrase, and I really liked the portrayal of the author, with his love of all things shiny. I suppose I can forgive the marketers - if I hadn't thought "funny", I might not have picked it up (after all, don't I have enough depressing stuff to read?), but that definitely isn't my overall impression of the book.

Stopped by a garage sale yesterday and saw a few books stacked on the sidewalk. The nice young lady said they were two for a dollar - a fine price - so I started digging through them in earnest.

I came away with:

Running with Scissors
My Antonia
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Tom Jones
The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners (Rosenberg)
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Michael Chabon)

A little while back, I read about The Last Unicorn on Neil Gaiman's blog (he mentions the special edition of the DVD but there are lots of earlier references to Peter Beagle in there).

It sounded like something I should check out, so I reserved a whole bunch of Peter Beagle books from the library. (I love being able to reserve books at the library and waltz in to pick them up a few days later.)

Wow. What a great book. I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Her description of assembling new hives is utterly delightful, especially the last paragraph.

And I loved this:

The only time I ever believed that I knew all there was to know about beekeeping was the first year I was keeping them. Every year since I've known less and less and have accepted the humbling truth that bees know more about making honey than I do.

(p. 47)

and this: