books

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:

Happened by a garage sale today given by a young woman with some tastes fairly similar to mine, apparently. I picked up Rousseau's Confessions, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth by Bertrand Russell, and Composicion - Proceso y síntesis, textbook and workbook, all for $2.50.

Over the weekend I read a children's book, The Kitchen Madonna.

It was a gift from a friend of my mom's, sent via Mom.

When I was a child, I loved a book called The Diddakoi, by Rumer Godden. It was about a gypsy girl, and I loved reading about her caravan and her love for horses as much as about her finding friendship and a caring family.

Mostly I loved the caravan.

The Kitchen Madonna is another Rumer Godden book.