Kristi Wachter.com

Karen's Weekend Assignment this week asks about favorite types of books. My favorite genre at the moment is extremely specific:

John McPhee books.

There are a lot of great book recommendation threads on Ask Metafilter, and I have a long list of books highlighted there that sounded interesting. The Control of Nature came up in two or three threads, so I requested it from the library.

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)