Reading and climbing

[kelkyag]

I finished Connie Willis's "Bellwether". (I blame ironrat and jencallisto.) I think it's not as good a book as "Doomsday Book", but I enjoyed reading it more: it was quite lighthearted, where Doomsday Book was dreadfully depressing. I wasn't as willing to buy into the bellwether/chaos theory as the time traveling historical scholars and an influenza epidemic, which left me reading an amusing story while very aware that it was an amusing story rather than hanging on the fate of the characters. The events in Bellwether also felt much more coincidental -- which was a theme of the story and reasonably neatly tied up at the end, but it kept distracting me along the way. The seeming coincidences in Doomsday book made much more causal sense in the end. They're both worth reading, in different moods.

I ran into a pair of raccoons the other night, the first time I've seen any in the city, and watched them cross the street and climb over a chain link fence. No catlike bounding there -- they grabbed the wires with their paws and climbed up a link at a time -- I'd say "the way a human (with small enough hands) would" except that once they got over the awkward points at the top, they climbed down the other side head first, which most humans wouldn't.

I miss climbing lobby seven -- I wish they hadn't put the pigeon wire up. I should find a jungle gym that's big enough for me to play on, or something else to climb.