I know you don't really wanna unleash the dragon

[venta]

Oxfam are bastards, and they are in league with the buses of Reading.

Y'see, whenever I get to the bus stop (which isn't that often, due to cycling most days[*]) I do it slightly too late to catch the bus which is departing. Which means I have to wait around for ten minutes. And I can either sit about in a bus shelter... or go into the Oxfam bookshop. Just to have a look around, you understand. And pass the time.

Except Oxfam - as well as making the bus run ahead of time so I miss it - have got a habit of putting books with interesting covers at about my eye-height just as you walk in the door. Don't judge a book by its cover, y'say? I find it often works quite well. I originally bought my favourite-ever book because it had a cool cover.

So, interesting black and white cover? Silly-sounding plot? Dragons? Oh, go on then.

The ten minutes' reading I got in on the bus confirmed initial suspicions: I expect the rest of the book to be silly, lightweight, and rather enjoyable.

I'm not meant to be spending money on books, though. Not even charity second-hand ones :(

[*] But not today. Thanks to a rather strange slide-and-kneel-down movement I did on Kilburn High Road last night giving me a sore knee. The odd things was, the knee-pavement impact wasn't even very great, and I had time to think "gosh, that was an odd manouevre, thank goodness I didn't bang my knee hard, and I must look quite silly" before I got round to thinking "aaaargh, that's actually really painful".

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

Um, um, I might have accidentally bought the second one while I was in there, too. I mean, if I liked the first, and went back for the second, it'd have gone. Wouldn't it?

I'll get back to you when I've read them :)

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

Be warned, the 'lightweight' begins to fall off sharply.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Black Powder War was painful going...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ah. Dammit. It seems Black Powder War is the other one I picked up, under the erroneous impression that it was the second book. Which it isn't.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Noo, you be wanting The Throne of Jade.

[triskellian]

...And Black Powder War follows more-or-less directly on from Throne of Jade, so you don't really want to read them the wrong way around.

[venta.livejournal.com]

OK, I get it... everyone in the whole world has read these books, apart from me :)

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

And me!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Phew :)

[triskellian]

Hey, I'm only a couple of weeks ahead of you, I just gobbled the first three up fairly rapidly. Am just considering the complicated interactions of price per hour spent reading, space taken up by book, and shininess of Kindle edition before buying the rest.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Simple - nip over the road and filch oxfordgirl's copies :)

[triskellian]

No, but the shiniess of the Kindle edition! Also the desire to own all of them!

...and the suspicion that if I start buying hard copies halfway through, the asymmetry will bug me and I'll end up buying hard copies of the ones I've already got on Kindle. Hmm, that might be a decision...

In other news, I agree with maviscruetthat they're literary crack.

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

What books?

And as for not judging books by their covers... that must be quite a hurtful aphorism to people who create art and copy for the publishing world.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Naomi Novik's books, the first of which is called Temeraire (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Temeraire-k-His-Majestys-Dragon/dp/0007258712/). Unless that was just a clever way of saying you hadn't read them, in which case it went over my head :)

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

Clever? I don't know what you mean.

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

Hurrah for Temeraire! I love these books. They're very fun.

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

There like litery crack - I'm up to book 5.

"Horatio Hornblower gets a dragon" is how I like to describe it....

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

Much closer to Aubrey than Hornblower, I found.

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

I loved them. And haven't read the latest one yet. Did you see the adverts for the Sci Fi Spectacular the Oxfam shop is doing in March? We're going to see if we can help out/host something/interfere...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Er, no, I didn't see any posters for that. Maybe I'll have to go into the bookshop again...

[condign.livejournal.com]

My wife loved these, and kind of took exception to the whole "silly" thing. :) That said, she got the first one free on Kindle, which would seem to indicate that Novik's publishers are fully aware that they're crack, and they're operating on the "schoolyard dealer" theory of marketing.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'm now half-way through Temeraire (and have put it down to work hard, even though I'm working at home - see me be grown up!) I am enjoying it hugely, but if the idea of an Aviation Corps swooping about on giant dragons doesn't strike Mrs Condign as a little silly, then... well, then I guess she and I have differing definitions of "silly" :)

I didn't mean it as a bad thing...

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Let me know what happens when they try to tug a dragon to her last birth to be broken up.

Have you read A Dream of Scipio?

[a-llusive.livejournal.com]

I thought it better than Fingerpost, but of course it isn't set in Oxford

Re: Have you read A Dream of Scipio?

[venta.livejournal.com]

I haven't, no. I bought a copy when it came out, but then ended up pressing it into service as an emergency birthday present before I got round to opening it. I don't appear to have replaced/read it now.

I did read Stone's Fall, Pears' most recent non-fluffy-whodunnit novel, recently and it's brilliant. A bit dense (I had to read it twice to get it ;) but really, really good.