because this is particularly appropriate right now.

Title: Changing Planes
Author: Ursula K LeGuin

A mostly sci-fi author, I got to know her name from Neil Gaiman's blog, which is really a treasure trove for information, besides being an entertaining read. Through him, I've read Jonathan Carroll (White Apples, Land of Laughs), Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell) and now LeGuin, and I've enjoyed all their books.

Changing Planes is about how you can travel to other planes while waiting in airport lounges, because you need an obscene amount of boredom to be able to do so. She highlights some of these planes so it comes about in a series of short stories. One of my favourites is the plane where some people sprout huge wings during adolescence and become 'fliers'. It isn't particularly cool and it can seriously impede your career, so there is a certain kind of warped prejudice towards fliers, who are sometimes treated as handicapped. It's an oddly realistic situation and I feel a clever parody on many different things in life that different people are prejudiced towards.

Some stories speak to me more than others, which is to be expected of course. The book I'm reading now is The Time Traveller's Wife, which Bean lent to me. So far so good.

Reading a Dame's work.

Yes I ripped the blog address off NLB's commendable exercise, so let me take half a minute to express my heartfelt appreciation for the institution. Without it, my mind would never have been able to travel to so many sunny resorts and collapsing dungeons. Nor would I have been able to learn the existence of words like 'erstwhile' and 'flummoxed'.

Welcome to those who've stumbled on this record of my reading list. It is for me to remember what I read and what it was about, because the capacity of my memory embarrasses me. And I know it can be useful to have a direction-pointer when you don't know what to read, so I hope you will find something that eventually makes your list of 'Top Ten Best Reads'. Have a good trip.



Title: Aiding and abetting.
Author: Muriel Spark.

Finished it a few days ago, and really enjoyed it. Was pointed to her books by Lorna Landvik's "Angry Housewives eating Bon Bons", which I've mentioned somewhere else. My apologies for being repetitive. Anyway, it's where I picked up several threads, including Spark's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie".

If you're looking for a bit of dark entertainment, you might like this. Did not expect it to confuse but it did, in a good way though. Kept the tempo up. The ending is typical of Brit humour novelists (think Wodehouse), in that it is a happy one. You may not totally agree if you are a pure kindhearted soul, but it definitely made me smile especially when I envisioned Spark's glee at writing Lucan's fate.

Okay that's all I can think of, for now.