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juushikaOn a much lighter note:
I sit now in the library with a pile of four books. One of them is Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, which was released today. It happens to smell fantastic, a little bitter from the vivid red of the cover, rich with the incense of real-world, paper pages. Sometime next week I expect I'll be up in Portland to see Valente at at least one of the Portland stops of her release tour—and I'm looking forward to that hugely, because I hold fond memories of the last time I saw her on tour. I wrote about Fairyland before, when it was being serialized. That recommendation still stands, and I'm guilty of treasuring the book even more now that it's in print. Not much beats a book, the thing itself, for me.
One of them is of course Cat's Eye, because I was reviewing it. This copy of the book is quietly exceptional, because it had stray pages tucked into the binding: the corners of 187 through 193 were stolen from another copy and glued into mine, ripped through the middle and trimmed neatly along strange angles where they lined up the edges of my book. Normally a near-misprint like this would mean there'd also be pages missing from my book, but it was entire and correct. I collect favorite bookmarks. They're never anything intended to be used that way, because I'm lazy and lose things too easily anyway. One is the backing to a shipping label sticker, which I love because it is the precise size of a trade paperback. One is a little letter that was stuck into a book sent as a gift. And now one is a few spare, unusual pages which were a perfect match for the book they marked because they were, of course, ripped from that book.
The other two are fairy tales of sorts, for children more or less. These are the signs that I've been leaning back towards books as my primary occupation, once again: a stack of books, posts about books (and, er, more of a LiveJournal presence), too many books that I'm anxious to read. And you know? I like it.
I sit now in the library with a pile of four books. One of them is Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, which was released today. It happens to smell fantastic, a little bitter from the vivid red of the cover, rich with the incense of real-world, paper pages. Sometime next week I expect I'll be up in Portland to see Valente at at least one of the Portland stops of her release tour—and I'm looking forward to that hugely, because I hold fond memories of the last time I saw her on tour. I wrote about Fairyland before, when it was being serialized. That recommendation still stands, and I'm guilty of treasuring the book even more now that it's in print. Not much beats a book, the thing itself, for me.
One of them is of course Cat's Eye, because I was reviewing it. This copy of the book is quietly exceptional, because it had stray pages tucked into the binding: the corners of 187 through 193 were stolen from another copy and glued into mine, ripped through the middle and trimmed neatly along strange angles where they lined up the edges of my book. Normally a near-misprint like this would mean there'd also be pages missing from my book, but it was entire and correct. I collect favorite bookmarks. They're never anything intended to be used that way, because I'm lazy and lose things too easily anyway. One is the backing to a shipping label sticker, which I love because it is the precise size of a trade paperback. One is a little letter that was stuck into a book sent as a gift. And now one is a few spare, unusual pages which were a perfect match for the book they marked because they were, of course, ripped from that book.
The other two are fairy tales of sorts, for children more or less. These are the signs that I've been leaning back towards books as my primary occupation, once again: a stack of books, posts about books (and, er, more of a LiveJournal presence), too many books that I'm anxious to read. And you know? I like it.
