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.