Books on the Bus

What I want to do mainly is write about books I read. I work near a Goodwill where, on a good day, I can buy 10 books for $5. Because it's a Goodwill, of course, I can't intend to buy anything in particular, and I'm at the mercy of whoever it is that donates books to Goodwill.

In other words, it could happen (and has) that I finish Voltaire and start Mary Higgins Clark. David Baldacci follows Turgenev. Winston Groom precedes Mark Twain. It's very random, topsy-turvy, indiscriminate.

Kind of like the bus I'm riding while I read. I started taking the bus over 2 years ago, for environmental reasons, mainly; though it's turned out it saves money, too. (By the way, once in a while I survey the cars going by the bus stop. In Omaha, on the average, 92 out of a hundred cars are occupied only by their driver.)

The bus goes straight down Center Street. I get on near Interstate 680, and the first leg of the ride is through veritable suburbia, with lawns brick houses and access roads. It swoops down a long hill, eases through an area of strip malls past a Walgreens and a supermart, past a cemetery and up into a hospital complex. Emerging from that, we're in a city, an industrial city, with mud on the street, dilapidated buildings, industrial businesses. We massly transit that and are back to a residential area. That's where I get off.

So it's one change after another both inside and outside the bus. The passengers change as drastically as the quality of the books and the scenery. There are only one or two that are there most days; for the most part, it's a mixed and unpredictable lot.

So that's the set-up. I've got a backlog of books to review, which is good: I'm currently reading The Idiot, and it could take me two years to get through it. I'll start reviews with the next entry.