Kristin Buxton

If you followed the link over from my old blog, welcome. I make no promises about the frequency of posts however.

I haven’t posted at months, and apologize for this. I just found out though that blogger is going to stop supporting the method I’ve been using to publish this blog in the next couple of months. Until I figure out if I’m going to migrate to the blog to blogspot, or convert it to WordPress, or if there’s another option, the blog is going to sit here unloved and unchanged.

Last night I finished China Mieville’s The City & the City, a murder mystery in two strange cities. Unlike his other books this isn’t fantasy, though doesn’t take place anywhere “real”. One city is Beszel and the other is Ul Qoma and the story takes place in both, but I’ll let you read the book to find out the relation between the two. Check out this video interview with Mieville discussing the book and the cities.

Somewhere along the way something on blogger got confused and this blog is no longer creating archive files properly. I apologize. At some point I’ll redesign the whole thing and then hopefully everything will work properly again.

Actually I do know why I’m in a book group. Besides the free lunch every month, it gets me to read things I’d never have read otherwise. This month’s book is a good example. I Don’t Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson. The main character is a woman trying to judge a time-consuming career with motherhood of two small children. Definitely not my normal sort of book choice. Unusually for this sort of book I never wanted to through it across the room. I don’t imagine, however, that the author’s main goal had been to make me happy that I don’t have children.

I haven’t done very well at remembering to read books for the 1% Well-Read Challenge in the last few months. So far I’ve read one, which I guess makes me .1% Well-Read. I just finished Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. The book group at work is going to discuss it at lunch tomorrow. I’ll be interested to see what other people think. I actually found it a chore to get through. I don’t quite understand why people consider it a classic. If you’ve read it, and loved it, care to share why?

I think I’m finally realizing why I never post anymore, or at least why my post frequency has dropped so much: I’m no longer working a job I dislike. Back when I was writing code I posted often from work. I needed the break. Now I don’t. I’m not saying I’m not online at my new job, but it’s usually for quicker things. Skimming through some blog posts and marking the ones to read later. A quick turn at scrabble. Checking email. Not sitting down and trying to write something. Fortunately I didn’t have a large audience waiting for my next post.

Last night I finished Masha Hamilton’s The Camel Bookmobile. A bored librarian from New York goes to Kenya to help start up library service to some of the rural population by transporting the books by camel. A boy in one of the villages doesn’t return his books as promised and she arrives off-schedule to try to get them back and she begins to get a taste of what life is really like there.

The bookmobile really exists, but the story around it is fiction.

I don’t usually hit a point in a book and just decide I’m not finishing it, but I did tonight. Worse yet, it’s a book for the book group meeting Thursday. What finally drove me over the edge was having the main character die a third of the way through the book. I see now that this plot twist is hinted at in reviews, but I’m not sure if I’d have picked up on it had I read them before starting the book.

I ended up on the social activities committee at work this year. Our second event of the year happened last Friday when we visited the Long Beach Aquarium. If I go again, I’ll make sure to do it during the school year so there aren’t quite as many kids running around. I pet a ray, but just watched people feeding lorakeets rather than doing so myself. (I never did find out exactly why there was a bird exhibit at an aquarium).

One more event, and then it’s someone else’s turn.

I’ve been slowly working my way through Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi via dailylit. In today’s chunk I came across the following quote I just needed to share:

“We had dinner on a ground-veranda over the water–the chief dish the renowned fish called the pompano, delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.”

I want a meal like that.