Friday, September 30, 2011

Short stories and beeswax

What in the world happened to September??  My last posting was on the last day of August, and now it's the last day of September!  Maybe I slipped into a time vortex...

Well, even if I haven't been very good about updating the blog for the past month, I have been reading some great books.  I thought I would share two of them with you.

While I love reading novels, it isn't always easy for me to get through one in a timely manner.  That's why short stories are so great.  I'm making my way through a wonderfully quirky collection of stories entitled Tunneling to the Center of the Earth.  The author, Kevin Wilson, offers interesting characters with strange jobs, odd behavior, and peculiar tendencies.  Take the woman who works as a fake grandmother for families who no longer have grandparents, or whose grandparents are less than, shall we say, desirable.  Or the three college grads who decide to dig a tunnel beneath a town - and end up living in the tunnel for several months.  And wait till you meet the guy who works in a Scrabble factory and worries about spontaneous combustion.  The stories may be weird and disquieting, but they all contain an element of plausibility.

The other book I've been enjoying this month is Confessions of a Bad Beekeeper: What Not to Do When Keeping Bees (With Apologies to My Own).  I'm not a fan of stinging insects, but I am rather fascinated with the whole bee world.  Without them, we'd be in a bit of a pollination pickle, and we've all heard the scary news about bee colonies collapsing.  But how do bees and beekeepers do what they do?  Bill Turnbull, a BBC journalist, decided to find out the answer to this question by joining his apiary brethren in the fine art of beekeeping.  He has a very witty way about him, and even when describing serious bee stuff, he manages to make the whole process quite interesting.  If you're curious about bee swarms, hive management, or what it's like to put on a beekeeper's outfit and discover a bee inside your veil, give this book a try.