Naomi Novik (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} naominovik) wrote,@ 2005-12-17 01:48:00 |
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Temeraire is out! and 15 Things About Books
I returned home from vacation to find a pair of glorious packages waiting for me from the UK, with two copies of the hardcover, one copy of the trade paperback edition (a surprise as I didn't know they were doing it), and three of the BCA (UK book club) edition, which are what I think of as jewel-box-size hardcovers. All I need now are four calling birds and a handful of gold rings, and I've got a song. *g*
And, and and! The UK edition of Temeraire is in stores in Australia -- for once the down under folks get it first. *g*My reported sightings are all of the trade paperback edition -- looking at the Voyager Australia website announcement, it says tpb, so perhaps that's the division -- hardcover in UK, tpb in the Commonwealth. But that is a complete guess on my part -- it might be that both versions show up. *mystery*
15 Things About Books, because this is one of the few memes ever where I have read every fresh instance with pleasure.
I returned home from vacation to find a pair of glorious packages waiting for me from the UK, with two copies of the hardcover, one copy of the trade paperback edition (a surprise as I didn't know they were doing it), and three of the BCA (UK book club) edition, which are what I think of as jewel-box-size hardcovers. All I need now are four calling birds and a handful of gold rings, and I've got a song. *g*
And, and and! The UK edition of Temeraire is in stores in Australia -- for once the down under folks get it first. *g*My reported sightings are all of the trade paperback edition -- looking at the Voyager Australia website announcement, it says tpb, so perhaps that's the division -- hardcover in UK, tpb in the Commonwealth. But that is a complete guess on my part -- it might be that both versions show up. *mystery*
15 Things About Books, because this is one of the few memes ever where I have read every fresh instance with pleasure.
- The final version of Black Powder War (book 3) got e-mailed to my editor Tuesday the 6th, leaving me more than half the vacation to lounge around in, reading. I then realized that I'd forgotten to edit one section that now no longer fit in with the previous, but in a fit of rebellion left it until this past weekend after I got home to actually do. The final final version was e-mailed on Monday morning, and crossed Internet paths with my editor sending me a handful of small quick-to-fix comments on the previous rewrite. The final final final version was delivered about thirty minutes later. Final, er, barring the copyedits. And the addendum. And, well, the point is, I am mostly-sort-of done, for now, which is why I have time to do this meme.
- Some of my very favorite books as a child were these little educational science books in a series of [X] Do The Strangest Things. Reptiles Do The Strangest Things had a horned toad that spits red juice. Birds Do The Strangest Things had the bowerbird, which builds this elaborate giant nest adorned with berries and things. Dinosaurs Do The Strangest Things called apatosaurs brontosaurs during a formative period of my life. I have been unable to really accept the correct name ever since.
We also had these dual language Polish/English comic books around at home when I was a child, except they weren't like the comics we got then; they retold old Polish legends: graphic novels before the term was really being used. One of them was about a dragon who was killed by a shoemaker's apprentice who tricked the dragon into eating a fake sheep that was stuffed with gunpowder, and ended on his shiny pair of green dragonskin boots. Another was about the terrible king (Popiel, I think?) and his witchy wife. They ended up being eaten alive in a tower by rats, which was fairly traumatic to read about at the age of five or six or so. - I used to climb up on top of the piano to get down the books my mother had put on the top shelf of the bookcase above it, presumably because these were too mature for someone who had to climb on top of the piano to reach them. Ah, Clan of the Cave Bear and Valley of the Horses. Good times. (The comic book with the people being eaten by rats was not up on this shelf.)
- Inside The Seraglio, by John Freely, which is sitting right next to my computer at the moment, ends with him describing how he sneaked inside the harem in Topkapi Palace before it was open to the public and wandered around in the dusty rooms. I would deeply have loved to imitate this illicit behavior, but I didn't quite have the courage to try and creep away from the guided tour with the security guard close behind.
- Reading is compulsive for me. I can't put down a trilogy in the middle, much less a book, unless compelled by external forces of irresistible might. Exhaustion, approaching dawn, school assignments, people speaking to me, etc, do not qualify. Firm appointments do, but only narrowly, and I have in fact gotten places late because I could not put down what I was reading. I've gotten slightly better at this as I've gotten older, but only up to a point.
- I read very fast, in paragraphs at a time and not word-by-word. I am occasionally accused of skimming, to my irritation.
- I re-read with as much pleasure or more as the first time around. Although, obviously, I only do this with books I enjoyed the first time around.
Wait, actually, that's not true. I will re-read books I didn't much like -- or more truthfully that I don't think well of, or that irritated me in one way but not uniformly, but which still *got* me in some way. I re-read them resentfully and yet with the same compulsiveness. - I almost invariably forget the plots of mystery novels as soon as I'm done with them. This is helpful with re-reading, and I try to encourage it in myself. I also almost never guess who the villain is beforehand, because I'm never trying to.
- The one book I have ever returned to a store for money, and which I somewhat regret not burning in a ceremonial bonfire, is House Atreides, the first of the horrible Dune tie-in novels, which I bitterly resent though I don't at all mind and occasionally even enjoy movie/tv tie-in novels that are bad in exactly the same ways and to the same degree.
- I realized this last vacation, reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and talking to Charles about it, that Dune is Lawrence of Arabia in space, if Lawrence had actually been a prophet. If everyone else figured this out years ago and been keeping it quiet, I will feel silly about confessing this, but I found it amazingly satisfying to recognize.
- Since starting to write the books and doing all the associated nonfiction research reading, I have developed a backlog stack of unread fiction books. This has never happened to me before and it makes me uneasy.
- I am not gentle with books. I dog-ear pages, I crack spines, I leave them open face down on tables. I highlight and scribble in textbooks and research books. I don't like to borrow books from the library or from friends because I have to constantly think about being careful with them, and that interferes with my immersion.
- I didn't re-sell any of my textbooks. Actually, during book-buying time I would end up buying textbooks for classes I wasn't taking.
- The most difficult book I have ever read is Concrete Mathematics. (Or rather, it's the subject that was difficult; the book itself was as good as it could be.) The course had open-book/notes exams (the average was still something like 50% or so, as I recall), so it is covered with little hand-made tabs I cobbled together from paper and scotch tape. It is the only textbook I have that is not underlined, because underlining was not good enough; I had to take separate notes on each part to get them to stick in my head.
- We have the best bookcases in the world. They are two-layered, with shallower sliding ones on rollers in front full of paperbacks, and deep ones in back. Our books are separated by genre (fantasy & sf mostly mine, mystery mostly Charles', children's books mine, literature a jumbled mix, textbooks mine, genre magazines and Tom Swifties his) and alphabetized within genre. However, this idealized scheme sometimes falls apart under my tendency to take five books at a time off the shelf to read. I have not really even started my www.librarything.com database, but I want to.
