In other news, I've just made $93.84 re-selling 40 graphic novels on eBay.  Go me!

This calls for celebration, i.e., book-buying.  I've ordered a Roger Zelazny omnibus called The Second Chronicles of Amber as well as [finally!] a 1980's edition of Edward Eager's Seven-Day Magic.  Sadly, my Zits comic strip book from PaperbackSwap got lost in the mail.  Odd.  That's the third comic strip book that hasn't made it! 

Meanwhile, a large upheaval of site implementation is being pondered.  Oracle database?  XML + XSLT?  My own domain name?  What does the future hold?

[7day]

I've recently discovered the power of the Library of Congress catalog.  (Part of my new job involves sending paperwork to the LC, so I'm more familiar with it than I was.)  It has a more complete listing of Scott Adams's Dilbert books than Wikipedia.  Thus, my Scott Adams page is much improved. 

Library of Congress ceiling on postage stamp

I completed a rite of passage today -- I sold a book on eBay!  Many people have bought something on eBay, and many of them talk about selling something.  But now I've gone and done it.  I've climbed the learning curve.  This leaves me [perhaps overly] optimistic about selling other books there.  So now the store on my Verizon site is really dead.  Please check for my inventory here, here, and here:

• www.paperbackswap.com

• www.titletrader.com

• www.ebay.com

Cha ching!

What do I mean by that?  Well, I've discovered what I think is a great way of getting rid of books I don't want.  I have posted books to www.paperbackswap.com, where every book request I fulfill and ship earns me one free book credit.  There are several websites that do this sort of thing, but PaperbackSwap seems to have the most features and the largest inventory.  The system is easy to use.  Plus, the users are rather active.  Within a couple of hours of posting 23 books, I got requests for 5 of them!

I've put my movies on www.titletrader.com, but I'm not as enthusiastic about that site.

Buy.com

• The Witches of Bailiwick (Beatrice Bailey 5) by Sandra Forrester
• The Witches of Winged-Horse Mountain (Beatrice Bailey 4) by Sandra Forrester
• How Are You Peeling? by Freymann Saxton
• The Story of Dr. Dolittle by Hugh Lofting
• Chronicles of Chrestomanci II by Diana Wynne Jones

Twice Sold Tales (near U of WA)

• Dragondrums by Anne McCaffrey
• Stop Stealing Sheep by Erik Spiekermann and E. M. Ginger
• Beyond the Burning Lands by John Christopher

Magus near (U of WA)

• The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge

Half Price Books (near U of WA)

• Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron
• Asimov on Numbers by Isaac Asimov
• The Beggar Queen by Lloyd Alexander
• The Fairy's Return by Gail Carson Levine
• The Fairy's Mistake by Gail Carson Levine

BLMF Bookshop (in Pike Place Market)

• All About Language by Mario Pei

In Seattle I also bought some wheat pennies and winged liberty (Mercury) dimes.

I just read Bored of the Rings, a parody I didn't truly enjoy.  It and some other books have just migrated to the store page.  However, there are two quotes funny enough to post.

Much more enjoyable was Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, the audio version of which I have now finished listening to.  I now have Emma and Sense and Sensibility checked out, and am listening to Emma.

~~~

~~~

~~~

700+

In no particular order:

• I went to Barnes & Noble on Friday for their Harry Potter release party - it was amazing to see all the people.  I'm glad I went, even though I didn't have to buy a book in person.  On Saturday I received in the mail (and read) the copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that my brother ordered for me.  The "death of a major character" was sad, but logical, come to think of it.
• I've recently bought books at these bookstores:
  • Half Price Books in Montgomery
  • Princeton Public Library
  • Booktrader of Hamilton
  • Book Swap in North Brunswick
• I won a yet-to-be-received "gold" medal at the regional race on June 19.
• I've progressed in my cable knitting project.
• My new job as Associate Production Editor seems to be going well, and the new Sales Assistant started today, so this week I'll pass the torch.
• I've re-discovered Jane Austen's novels.  I've thus far checked out, listened to, and enjoyed Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and have started listening to Mansfield Park.  Although customs and manners have changed, human emotion and human silliness seem not to have done so...
  Click for a nice quote from Mansfield Park.
• My woefully undocumented coin collection has been augmented by a recent visit to Trenton Stamp and Coin.  I still need a 1950-D nickel, though!
• Another book for the lost and found list: a book about a modern teenage boy in a purple shirt who gets stuck in a primitive valley.  I did a search (well, several searches!) on some plot keywords, and found the book described on an Amazon page.  It's called A Time of Darkness by Sherryl Jordan, and it's out of print.  I still had a copy on my shelf at home, though.  (Good old packrat habits!)  I re-read it, and it's just like I remember. . . except that I forgot the punch line, that seemingly insignificant actions can change the world.
• I've decided Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Tree House series is cool.  I read the first book, and it was very cute.  Plus, the series is designed to instill a love of books, reading, and imagination.  I haven't bought any - there are more than 30 volumes, and they're $5 each.  I'll watch for them at rummage sales, where they'll be $0.50 -- that's 90% off!

From Amazon

• 50th Anniversary Edition of Edward Eager's Half Magic
• T. A. Barron's The Great Tree of Avalon: Child of the Dark Prophecy
  (After I read it, I'll be able to read the Avalon book I got at BEA>)
• Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre (4-disc set)
  (I've watched 5 out of 26 so far.)

From Elsewhere

• Of Two Minds by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman
  (After I read it, I'll be able to read More Minds.)
• Gryphon in Glory by Andre Norton
• Wizard at Work by Vivian Vande Velde
• Rowan of Rin by Emily Rodda
  (After I read it, I'll be able to read Rowan and the Travelers.)
• Warriors: Into the Wild by Erin Hunter
  (Start of a new series.)

Coming in the mail:

• Zits Unzipped by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman
  (Zits Sketchbook 5)
• Rhymes with Orange: A Cartoon Collection by Hilary Price
  (Neener, neener, neener!  I only paid $10.00, but I'm seeing it listed for at least $50, if not $100 or $200!)

I'm also the somewhat sheepish owner of another double handful of $0.50 paperbacks, thanks to a sale I attended in Freehold on Friday.  Now, where to put them?

I got my copy of Harry Frankfurt's NYT bestseller signed at the Princeton Barnes & Noble on the evening of Thursday June 9th.  The author gave a short talk on his book to a healthy-sized audience, and answered questions. 

I am looking into buying some computer parts from Tigerdirect.  I will probably soon buy a pair of USB speakers and a USB hub (~$20 including shipping), but I'm also investigating buying a "bare bones kit."  It'd essentially  be a new computer, but will cost less than a new Dell system.  The package I looked at had a tower and a  motherboard with power supply, processor, fan, Ethernet, sound, memory, slots for expanding, and slots for the bits I'm not replacing (floppy drive, CD drive, 2 hard drives, graphics card).  It cost about $135.  Not bad for a "whole" new machine!  It'll have to wait, though: right now I need the money more than the machine.

[Signed!]

I am so grateful to the authors who signed books at the signing tables at BEA.  I don't watch television, and I seldom spend money on music, so celebrity actors and singers don't mean much to me... but authors do! Authors are my celebrities -- they create the worlds I live in.  For that, many thanks.  It was worth the lines.

signed | signed author | signed | signed


signed | signed | signed author | signed author

Thanks also to the authors who signed books for me at the publisher tables, and the other folks who spoke to me and gave me samples and flyers.  I think most folks staffing publisher booths ignore attendees with exhibitor badges, since publishers are there to do business with booksellers, not with random employees of other publishers.  So thanks to the folks who didn't ignore me!  I discovered two new genres thanks to them: graphic novels (read one this morning, called Ultra) and romance novels (which I haven't read yet).  Well, ok, my co-worker Dan gets some credit for introducing me to graphic novels, since I followed him to those booths.

all signed!

not signed

And I accidentally discovered the publisher of some of my favorite origami books, Kodansha.  (I folded a simple Tomoko Fuse box with paper they had at the booth.)  Looking through their catalog, it seems they sell many other interesting books, too!

Thanks also to "the Aldrunkles": Margret got me The Snowflake from her former employer, and her husband drove us home from the train station.

Yes, I did lug all these books around Javits!  Can you believe it?  My body is not thanking me today for loading so much onto it yesterday. 

A footnote:  Harry Frankfurt's book is now (or is about to be) the #1 NYT bestseller in hardcover non-fiction.  We've now done 10 printings, totaling over 200,000 copies.  You can bet there was some gloating happening at the Princeton University Press booth!

Some of the book categories on the site have been re-arranged a bit.  Miscellaneous has become three separate pages: Miscellaneous Fiction, Miscellaneous Non-Fiction, and Poetry & Drama.  The Site Map and the menu on the left reflect these changes.

Tomorrow I'll be at BEA, Book Expo America, along with half the world.  This is the trade show for book publishing in the US.  This year it's happening at the Javits Center in New York City, which is why I get to go.  I'm really excited that I'll get to see some of the authors whose books I buy, read and love. 

As far as my site is concerned, various pages have been tweaked.  And I'm in the middle of scanning another shelf's worth of books.  Take a stroll around and see if you can tell the difference.  In particular, you might notice that I fixed the comic strips page, which had some height and width problems.

In the meantime, adventures in hardware repair are going badly. Despite the aid of some really amazing stuff called First Try, I was unable to remove the fifth and final screw which attaches my fried circuit board to my old secondary hard drive. I have bought a new circuit board which should render the drive functional again, but I have to get the fried circuit board off first, don't I?

On the happier side, I ordered and received a copy of A Living Architecture, and am pleased with my purchase.

I saw Star Wars Episode III and didn't like it.  More opinion here.

"First Try (R) resists slipping for fast easy removal."

Another birthday present has trickled in: I am now editing my website with Microsoft FrontPage 2003.  (Previously, I was using the 2002 version.)  Thanks is due to my friend Dan at Microsoft for this useful upgrade. 

I have also bought some Harry Potter paperbacks: I will be re-reading them starting today, so that when the newest installment arrives in June, I'll be all up on the story.

I have added some books to the site today, in particular to the somewhat neglected Reference page.

There's a book I'm coveting called A Living Architecture. There are many books on Wright, but this book shows the work of Wright's Taliesin Fellowship architects -- people with vision similar to Wright who have carried on his work. Flipping through it, I got the impression that this book contained interesting, not-so-well-known, appealing buildings of all sorts.

I have decided to make my own Princeton Restaurants page. Stay tuned.

I've updated my knitting page too; go see!

I got two new Harry Potter books for my birthday:

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in Ancient Greek (Thanks Aquinas!)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Italian (Thanks Hobors!)

Well, three new Harry Potter books, if you count the fact that my brother Charlie ordered Harry Potter 6 for me, so that I'll get it when it comes out.  (Thanks Charlie!)

I was also given D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. (Thanks Chris!)

I have altered the cellpadding and cellspacing of my website's tables so that my pages look decent in Netscape!  I had been meaning to do that for a while.  And, having decided that Nvu was the cause of my earlier technical difficulties, I've re-installed Netscape on my home computer for testing purposes.  Now, if only I could get Netscape to stop rendering table borders with ugly beveled edges...

• Sci-Fi/Fantasy for Kids (A TON!)
• Sci-Fi/Fantasy (Bradbury x 1, Donaldson box set, Misc. McCaffrey)
• Love of Language (~ a half dozen scattered)
• Comic Strips (1 new Dilbert)
• Art & Architecture (Terrific MC Escher)
• Miscellaneous (Asimov, Dickinson, Fry)
• Miscellaneous for Kids (Burnett & Ransome)

I have a new fledgling page where I will put random notes on language. On that page, you will find my musings on English etymology, romance language cognates, grammatical conundrums, pet peeves and good clean word play.  Enjoy, if you're that sort; if not, avoid like the plague, (just as you would a cliché like that one). 

Not that I have working speakers to hear them with.

I was exploring new software for editing and testing my website in the interest of compatibility.  I downloaded a WYSIWYG editor (Nvu) and the browser Netscape.  Naturally, one of these programs messed up some sound files belonging to other applications, and now Outlook beeps when I get mail instead of playing the "new mail" noise, and my FTP software doesn't make any noises at all.  Disconcerting and completely un-called-for.  So I uninstalled both.  But that didn't fix the problem.

There's one problem I think I could fix right away, having to do with the esthetics of my website.  I could save my magic menu file as a .txt file rather than a full-blown .shtml file.  Netscape doesn't like it when the menu header shows up in a file that already has a header.  (Kaylee, I need that in Captain Dummy Talk.)  What I'm saying relates to the fact that my tables don't have the correct spacing around the edges when viewed in Netscape - everything is flush against the surrounding box.  I'm going to make it so there's a margin.

+

Netscape

=

No Noises!

I've made this intro page shorter by archiving entries from 2004.  Visit the archive by clicking here.

By the way, there's a Book Sale in Princeton Junction April 26 - 30 at West Windsor Library (Wed, Thu 10-9, Fri, Sat 10-5, Sun noon-4 ).  But first, coming next week is the Bryn Mawr book sale...  Yea!

Meanwhile in another part of town...

A Princeton University Press editor was overheard to remark that "this must be the first time in human history that the demand for bulls**t has exceeded the supply."  He was talking about Princeton University Press's bestselling book, On Bulls**t by Harry G. Frankfurt, which has been out of stock off and on since it was published.

It's currently #32 on the New York Times Bestselling Hardcover Nonfiction list.  We will soon have an unprecedented 120,000 copies in print!  The printing and reprinting arrangements, to say nothing of the publicity surrounding this book, have kept folks at the press busy and giggling for weeks now.  Frankfurt made a dignified appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and has been taped to appear on 60 minutes. 

What?  You haven't bought a copy yet?!  I just purchased mine yesterday, when I found out that the latest batch shipping from the warehouse was made with black cloth and red stamping (rather than tan cloth and green, red, black, or blue stamping). 

To purchase copies for yourself and your 87 best friends and/or least favorite politicians, head on over to Amazon, where this title is currently #17 on the top selling books list!  You can also purchase directly through Princeton University Press's website. 

For more information on On Bulls**t, read this NYT article or watch Princeton's interview with the author.  Or type the title and author into Google and get thousands of hits...

It purports to be a re-telling of the Cinderella story.  Because I never read anything about the book, I believed it would be a happy fairy tale.  But it turns out to be a gritty and somewhat darkly philosophical tale of a mother and her two daughters trying to survive the vicissitudes of life in the Netherlands during the tulip craze.  (?!)

It is difficult for me to evaluate it as what it is rather than as what I expected it to be.  Gail Carson Levine's Cinderella story Ella Enchanted beats Maguire's Confessions hands down, but that's apples to oranges.  Since I don't read modern fiction, I have a hard time relating to this book in a meaningful way - but I don't think I liked it.  I don't think I liked the message, or perhaps the fact that it had one, or maybe the way the message was conveyed.  It had rough edges which were, to me, a little unpleasant.  I suppose naturalist writing will always strike me as insufficiently whitewashed. 

Call me crazy, or naive, but I prefer an unqualified happy ending. 

The contrast between Gregory Maguire's writing and Nancy Springer's is instructive.  Maguire has helped me identify what I like so much about Springer's books.  In the books I've read by Nancy Springer, the heroes are heroic, the villains are villainous, the magic is magical.  Everything in the world she creates is idealized, stylized, purified, distilled.  There is nothing gratuitously crass or crude or cruel, even though the evil is as unadulterated as the good.  There can be no mistaking a character's intentions, motivations, or moral worth.  There is no grey area.  There is no normal; no mediocrity threatens; no one fades into the oblivion of guilty compromise or vague remorse.  Does such fantasy teach us valuable life-lessons?  Perhaps so, by showing us the ideally loyal, the ideally strong, the ideally brave.  But no story has to tell us about what life is like.  We read books to escape life, sometimes...

On a totally different note, you might like to read a funny excerpt of the book Dear Sir (Letters of ribaldry and desperation culled from war plants, draft boards, government agencies...) wherein A is not A as Aristotle's law of identity would have it, but rather A is X!

On a technical note, now that I am not using Photoshop to save my image files, I have to police my own filename lengths.  Apparently 31 is the magical compatible number.  Some of my recently uploaded images exceed 31 characters, so I have to go back and fix them.  This utility will help me find the offending files, at least.

I have recently bought, received, and read two Ruth Chew books that I'd never read before!  They are The Secret Summer (aka Baked Beans for Breakfast) and The Witch at the Window.  There's only one story left that I haven't read, which is The Secret Treehouse, although there are several books I still don't own.

I'm starting to think about my birthday.  If you are too, check my Things I Want page, not to be confused with my book wish list, which is always a little wishy-washy.

My store site is now beautissimus.  I made it look a bit like this site, with nested tables, but that site has backgrounds of midnight and marble.  I thought about making it some kind of green, which would go with this site, and I thought about making it red and black, because I have a cool basketweave background that's red and black (and I really like red and black in general), but I think the blue theme is as good as it gets.  Go see for yourself.

Last night I rediscovered a very cool book called Maze, by Christopher Manson.  It's not a story book.  It's a puzzle.  You enter a house, and you have to choose a numbered door.  Then you turn to that page number, and you're in a room with more doors to choose from.  You are supposed to go from page 1 to page 45 and back to page 1, but it isn't obvious how, although there are "clues."  Anyway, it's just spooky enough to be mysterious, and just puzzling enough to keep you flipping back and forth for a long time.  You really should find and explore this "book."  It seems to be out of print, but there seem to be many used copies floating around (e.g. on Amazon).  Actually, there's an online version with the text and images.  But of course, using the online version isn't as satisfying as using the book itself. 

If this does not sound enlightened to you, then obviously you're not one of the chosen.  And therefore I suppose I'll have to put it to you more plainly:  I've created a sister site on Verizon server space where I can sell books and movies that I want to get rid of.  You are hereby invited to go buy them. 

• I converted the coming soon page to a page about being webmaster.
• I moved some books back to the love of language page from reference.  I also added some new books on this page.  Some books have photos still to come. 
• I created an art and architecture page.  This page needs more books on it. 
• I created a geology page.  I need to add some more books to it, too.  Right now, all the books there are just from the miscellaneous page.
• I updated the site map to reflect these and other recent changes.

The language books are tricky to sort and separate, even though they are pretty different from each other.  I will work more on this problem later.  For now, anything remotely language-y (except things that are foreign language-y) will go on the ever bigger love of language page.  I am not sure what will happen to the reference page in the long run.  I may not have one.

Just a thought: I need to archive some of the older messages on this front page!

I'm really enjoying the two Edith Nesbit books I got for Christmas (see below).  I really think everyone should read Nesbit's books.  They are very quaint and entertaining.  Eager, another favorite author of mine, was greatly influenced by Nesbit: I think The Magic City inspired Knight's Castle!

I've added some bookscans, most notably to the foreign languages page, under J. K. Rowling, and on my knitting page.

I'm eagerly awaiting the following series books:

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J. K. Rowling (July 16, 2005)
• Eldest by Christopher Paolini (August 30, 2005)
• Inkspell Cornelia Funke (October 1, 2005)
• Ptolemy's Gate by Jonathan Stroud (October 6, 2005)

Cha ching!

I have figured out a little bit about Google's Picasa, and I think it will help me process photos for the web in batches (unlike with Photoshop, where basically everything has to be done one image at a time).  What that means is that photos are more likely to begin appearing on the site.  However, I am puzzled by several aspects of Picasa still, and the photos on my computer are sorta scattered, so don't count your chickens, or hold your breath or anything.

Speaking of batches...

Holey spatulas!  Why did I not go download the free Multiple Image Resizer utility months ago?!  It will help me process photos (like I just said Picasa could) but it will also help me resize my book cover scans, which are sized by percent, not by pixels.

Before:
I used to individually set the settings for and then individually name and save 3 copies of each book cover scan.

Now:
I can select a whole folder full, and tell the utility what percentage and what file format and what destination and what quality to give the files, and they will all magically go land there all at once!  And, if I name the scans before I resize, the resized copies won't need to be renamed.

Furthermore:
I'm not going to make 25% size covers anymore, since I never use them.  And from now on, I'm going to save all cover images at a higher jpg quality, so that scanning them becomes semi-worthwhile, though pages will be slower. 

Gosh, either I am very clever for figuring this out now, or very not clever for taking this long...!

This book is a dumbed-down highly metaphorical account of how Hubbard supposedly discovered (he says "computed") a supposedly scientific answer to all the problems of humanity.  It has a spaceship on the cover.  I read the whole book hoping to come across a reason for the spaceship, and the only thing remotely related was a couple of sentences at the end of the book: "Up there are the stars.  Down in the arsenal is an atom bomb.  Which one is it going to be?"  I suppose Hubbard himself intended to lead mankind to the stars.  By offering mankind some expensive therapy, no doubt.  Here's my paraphrase, complete with some jargon from the book: "Engrams, consisting of a complete set of perceptics, can occur during anaten (the unconscious state) as early as slightly before conception.  They  abberate the basic personality of a human by entering the reactive mind as demons which short the mental circuit and cause insanity when keyed in at a later date.  These engrams and their locks must be lifted and erased (by someone trained in Dianetics), and then the patient will be able to recall 100% of his conscious and unconscious experiences, and will be able to control his bodily fluids (e.g. his endocrine system) perfectly, so that all his organic psychosomatic ills will be cured."

If this isn't your idea of entertainment, and whose is it, visit my Movies page for more updates.

Can someone please explain, why the spaceship?

Here's why.

I did, however, find one gem.  It's L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science.  This has high amusement value.  If you don't know anything about Scientology, read this article.  Even an unbiased account of Scientology makes it sound sketchy!  Anything Hubbard says or writes is total BS. 

Speaking of which, Princeton has a new book out: a small-size 80-page essay by philosopher Harry Frankfurt called On Bulls**t.  I kid you not.  The first print run (5000x) has already sold out.

The "74rd" annual Bryn Mawr book sale is March 23-26.  It's a pretty big deal.  I went last year, and I'm looking forward to it already, even though I still have to wait a month and a half. 

How do I know about all these sales?  This website lists them.  You can use it to search for sales anywhere in the country!

Annual

Bryn

Mawr

Book

Sale

March

23

to

26

This update is brought to you by the word "seldom."  Have you ever noticed that people almost never use this word?

• Aquinas has earned a masters degree!  Only 3.5 more years to go...
• I'm skating in real speed skates now!  I'm very excited, also very tired.
• I'm learning to knit like crazy.  Fun stuff.

I checked out a few books at the library recently.  Bad news first. 

• Faerie Wars by Herbie Brennan
  This book is not for me.  I read a little and stopped, which I almost never do.  I am not surprised that the blurbs on the cover were from Eoin Colfer, author of Artemis Fowl, which I hated.  Faerie Wars is too much something for me; maybe it's too postmodernist for me, maybe it's too "dark", or maybe it's just a little disturbing.  Thank goodness I got this from the library rather than the bookstore.  I almost bought a copy.
• The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. 
  This story was mostly very clever, very cute, and very fun.  But it has a dark side, too, and so I wound up not liking it over all.  Very short book, by the way: I read it in an hour or so.  I thought of my brother Charlie, because there's a mouse in the story who keeps saying "Cripes!
• The Prophecy of the Stones by Flavia Bujor.
  This book was written by a 13-yr-old French girl.  Being impressed with the fact that she published a book at all is different from being impressed with the book itself.  It's an okay fantasy story, but it is, to my thinking, overly sentimentalized - exactly the kind of story I would have written when I was younger.  I wouldn't buy this one either.
• The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
  I really liked this one.  That's why I'm buying a hardcover copy of it and the sequel.  It vaguely reminded me of two other books, The Giver and Anthem.  The setting is a place which is fascinating to try to imagine, and the characters are admirable - that is, the ones who are supposed to be, are!

New books I just ordered (Thank you Colleen, for the B&N gift card!):

• Knitting for Dummies
• The Witches of Sea-Dragon Bay by Sandra Forrester
• The City of Ember and The People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau
• Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers

The only new stuff on the site right now is book log entries and some links. 

(This is just what one of my boots looks like.  There are in fact two skates, and they both have frames and wheels attached.  Duuh.)

I am so cool.

If you haven't been to the Random Stories page in a while, there will be some entertaining stories there that you haven't read yet.

I've added a few more author pages (see Site Map for listing) so I could move some info off the wish list page.  I'm still working on my wish list, but you can look at the quasi-improved version here.

Oh, and my speakers have died, I think.  They woke me up in the middle of the night last night, making an intolerably loud buzzing/siren sound.  I turned off the speakers and the noise stopped, but every time I try to turn them on again, I get the noise.  Grrrr!

►Improved Menu!
►More Stories!
►Quasi-Improved Wish List!
►Dead Speakers!

B U Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z

I moved some books onto the Reference page, since that's where they belong, but I didn't add new scans today.

I'm contemplating a geology category to be born out of the Miscellaneous category, but there aren't quite enough books there yet to warrant the creation of a new page.

I'm reading a book about Japan now, and I've got another book about Japan that I've been meaning to read.  (The one I bought from University of California Press several entries ago.)

Japan

Books/Movies I got for Christmas:

• Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke (Thank you, Crouches!)
• The Phoenix and the Carpet by E. Nesbit (Thank you, Crouches!)
• The Magic City by E. Nesbit (Thank you, Crouches!)
• Maxfield Parrish: A Retrospective (Thank you, Aquinas!)
• Kusudama Origami by Tomoko Fuse (Thank you, Dan!)
• Centennial Edition of The Fountainhead (Thank you, Mark!)
  More Ayn Rand books from Penguin
• Dragonsdawn by Anne McCaffrey (Well okay, I bought this one)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Traditional Chinese (Thank you, Hobors!)
• The Flight of the Navigator DVD (Thanks, Grandmartha & Grandaddy!)
• Spellbound DVD (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)
• Book on The Origins of Chinese Characters (Thank you, Hobors!)

• Archive 3 (11/14/05 to 12/31/06)
• Archive 2 (01/02/05 to 10/21/05)
• Archive 1 (08/09/04 to 12/17/04)