Jellyn’s Collection of Curiosities

Books Read in Novembers:

2002 – 11
2003 – 3
2004 – 4
2005 – 4
2006 – 3

It’s worth noting that in 2002, the couple months before it were anemic (sept – 2, oct – 3). Also I was apparently blazing through Diana Wynne Jones books. Some of them are quicker reads than others.

Most likely, though, it was because I started graduate school in Spring 2003. So every year after 2002, I had classes that ended in December. Add to that that there’s 30 days, Thanksgiving, Christmas shopping to think about, and repeated flirting with Nanowrimo and I guess reading goes out the window.

Just more proof that Nanowrimo should not be in November! Only December would be worse. Well, and possibly February because it’s shorter. Maybe I’ll do my own Nanowrimo in January or March. Or I should graph out all of my reading lists to find the one month I consistently read the most in and use that one.

I was going to blog about this after I finished it, but I’ve done all the looking around now, so I might as well post now.

This is Wizard Fantastic that I believe I got from Bookcloseouts.com. This is one of those sf/f ‘fantastic’ anthologies. Another one with Martin H. Greenberg as editor.

What was strange about it was that it’s huge. Rather than a mass market paperback, it’s trade paperback size, but chunky. Rather like you’d expect to see of large print books, but it’s not large print. So I looked a little more closely at it to figure out why the strange format.

It looks like it’s a reprint of a 1997 anthology, with a freshness date of 2004. From ‘bpbooks’, who helpfully tells us ‘The BP Books World Wide Web Site Address is: http://www.ibooks.net’. The URL is even underlined. Like their software underlined it and they didn’t know how to fix it.

Okay, so, interesting enough, but it gets more interesting when you find that that website no longer exists. Two years and already it’s gone? Here’s this publisher that was dedicated to republishing anthologies and things.. a worthy goal.. and they’re gone.

Well, it wasn’t terrifically easy to figure out what happened to them, because ‘bp books’ or ‘bpbooks’ and ‘ibooks’ are not exactly search terms that yield targetted results. But I was able to discover the BP stood for Byron Preiss. Seems he died in 2005 and the company went belly-up in February 2006. Chapter 7, which is an interesting little thing to learn by itself.

And most of this information is due to the always questionable content of Wikipedia.

So, now I know a little bit more of rather irrelevant trivia.

And so do you.

I estimate that Eefoof will credit me 35 cents for November. We’ll see if I’m right. And how long it takes them to tell me.

That’s 90 hits on 6 images. One image was there less than a day in November though.

I was thinking about adding a topic ‘Things That Suck’. I almost might as well make it ‘Yahoo Sucks’.

I sent a message late last night to a yahoogroup. It bounced. Things Yahoo did wrong.

1) Bounced me. This Email address is in my yahoogroup preferences.

2) Sent the bounce message to my bulk spam folder. You’ll send me spam sent to list-owner@yahoogroups.com, but you’ll mark as spam a message you sent me?

3) Buried it in my spam folder under 80+ messages that were dated 2011, 2037, and 2038. Seriously? You think I’m getting mail from the future from hot Filipino chicks?

4) Now I’ve sent it from my other Email address. It’s got to have been at least 10 minutes now. No bounce. No success.

Wow. November was a really bad reading month. If I could blame it on schoolwork and trying to find a job, I would. But it’s mostly from playing too many games and watching too much stuff.

Anyway, the last book I just finished is Children of Magic. It’s an anthology of fantasy stories about kids who’re magical. Believe it or not. Even though Martin Greenberg has his name on it, I don’t think he did much work on it. Maybe DAW (I think it was DAW) should just try branding these anthologies rather than try to stick Greenberg’s name on all of them.

The introduction spelled it ‘magick’. Which I really don’t like. What’s worse is it also spelled it ‘magickal’. Now that’s just silly. If you want the ‘k’ to differentiate between fantasy and Wicca or something, then fine. But when you do it in a fantasy anthology introduction, it’s just silly.

Tanya Huff has a story in here. I think it may’ve spoiled me a bit for her latest Smoke book. It’s not due out in paperback until June.

Naturally some stories were better than others. But it’s a nice sort of candy read anyway.

Most annoyingly, there were a lot of typos. I think they averaged about 3 a story. Those, of course, are only the ones I noticed. Sometimes it can be hard to tell if it’s writerly style or a wrong or missing word.

I’m going to start making note of books riddled with typos. See if they’re all one publisher or what.