a wedding in the country - katie ffordes (2021)

anodyne and saccharine.

happy ending.

anodyne and saccharine.

despite previous good experience with katie ffordes.

anatomy of a airplane flight

things happen on my solo flight to guangzhou:

• i flop gratefully into my aisle seat (yeah!)
• i stand up to allow my window seat mate in
• a bunch of travelers show their excitement at air travel most vocally
• my seat back is wrenched by a fellow passenger on the way to her own seat
• a random baby starts a yodel. it starts low and reaches high
• somebody's suitcase drops from the overhead bin, fortunately intercepted!!
• my window seat mate starts coughing

• well! well! it looks like the middle seat will be empty!
• the baby lets out intermittent yells
• my window seat mate lets out intermittent coughs
• the vocal bunch settles down and quietens up
• the captain asks us all to get ready for take-off
• i hop up to retrieve my mask from the overhead bin (success!)

• the flight is nice and uneventful
• i am one row from the loo: best location ever!
• i watch food porn on the screen 
• baby is silent until the descent. very thankful. good baby
• seat mate mercifully snores instead of coughs
• we land and i get to test my chinese on google translate

aside: they should stop filming people actually eating food. most explicit and unattractive.

the academy - hilderbrand & cunningham (2025)

this is like mallory towers* made american and current, complete with a mam'selle equivalent and her french exclamations.

likable characters just a little larger than life

more tame than what i think american teens are like

enough tension but not so much i abandon the book

i enjoy this very much!

unfortunately i finish it before i realize the sequel is not out yet (aaaargh) and before my waiting list book** gets available. 

*the enid blyton classic that starts me onto school series

**my father's brain by sandeep jauhar

at the hawker center

some thoughts assail me today as i buy my breakfast:

• i need to stop describing my weekend look as the tau hway-auntie-at-the-market look. she is better groomed and dressed than my weekend self
• she looks super unfriendly. surely she cannot be; she doesn't know me and it is the start of day so it must be RBF
• better check my own default RBF, alter ego an' all

the seven rules of trust - jimmy wales (2025)

the style is rah-rah and upbeat.

you don't really sense that he is talking to you as a person or you as a corporation. he has plenty to say to both and it gets conflated.

but as a history of wikipedia and an explication of its inner workings it is inspiring convincing and now i want to be a wikipedia editor too.

assume good faith in dealing with disagreements. possibly the most practically functional piece of advice i've been given in a long while.

kissing frogs

• ethical chic - fran hawthorne (2012)  limited premise: are these cool companies as ethical as they are perceived to be? trouble is nobody really is and we don't need a book to conclude this. interesting background info about my favorite grocer's trader joe's who remains my favorite grocer despite appearing in the book
• careless people - sarah wynn-williams (2025) 1-and-a-half chapters in and she is still brightly idealistically conversationally positive without getting to the stated idea of her book so i give up
• having people over - chelsea fagan (2025) too much chat and too little substance so i also give up
• the seven rules of trust - jimmy wales (2025) most promising of the lot although the book is not so much about trust (he tries though) but about the story of wikipedia which really is quite a heartening story about the better side of humans

all because i am on the waiting list for my father's brain (sandeep jauhar) and the app says i am first in line so i don't dare start a heavy book right now.

bringing up baby

J2 finds this in the library. A and E will grow up subverted.