Cercant en va

[muckefuck]

For reasons I can't explain, I had to go back five years to find a previous entry on St George's Day. It's not like we typically do anything crazy to celebrate: I forget about it until lunchtime, when I slip off to pick up a rose and a book, and monshu forgets about it until dinnertime, when I present him with these. Then he gets abashed with gratitude, I get a kiss, the rose goes into water, and we sit and eat dinner.

He's still reading SF and Fantasy to unwind these evenings, so I wanted to find something in that vein--something I knew he wouldn't've discovered himself, so after a little brainstorming I settled on Nnedi Okorafor's Who fears death. A Nebula award nominee from a local author, how hard could it be to find? Hard when you're in Evanston. I've never looked for SF at Amaranth before, but I vaguely remembered them having one range of shelves devoted to it. Try a shelf and a half. Barnes & Noble had a range and a half, but lots of multiple copies so the selection was dismal.

But surely one can find recent award-winning local fiction at the campus bookstore? As if. My jaw gaped in disbelief as I stood in the middle of it slowly turning and realised I could see no books. Literally, not a one! Plenty of fucking sweatshirts, however. I decided there had to be some adjoining room whose existence was unknown to me and, sure enough, there was a flight of stairs down to a room stuffed with...textbooks. Loads and loads of textbooks--plus two display shelves of jumbled bargain books and new fiction, along with a rather apologetic clerk.

Good thing I had a second choice: China Miéville's Embassytown, relatively prominently displayed at B&N. Both the GWO and I had read Perdido Street Station, loved some things about it and hated others. But I keep reading very positive reviews of Miéville novels, so I mused to monshu the other day that it might be time to give him another chance. So we will, and he has St George to thank for that, by way of St Jude.

Comments

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

I read Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl roughly concurrently with Perdido Street Station, but enjoyed the former more, and think you might find it vaguely more interesting with its Thai setting if you're wanting more SF-type stuff to share. I enjoyed the latter, but not enough to put him his other books very high in my queue, where I'm devouring pretty much all the Bacigalupi I can get my hands on.

[sandor-baci.livejournal.com]

The "by way of St Jude" is nicely turned.

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

They're in the process of thoroughly gift-shop-ifying the Cornell Bookstore as well. Actually, now that I think about it, it's always just been called "The Cornell Store." They're slowly liquidating the academic books at 50% off, because they need more room for sweatshirts.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That was all I saw at first--just a lake of purple sweatshirts. It was alienating. I turned toward the nook where they used to have the foreign language editions and I saw a service counter for...I have no idea what. At first I thought electronic devices, but none of those were in evidence either.

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

If it's like here, the service counter is where they tell you they can *special order* any damn book you like...you know, *if* they don't have it.

[nitouche.livejournal.com]

I absolutely adored Miéville's the City and the City, but didn't finish Kraken (Peter liked the latter more than I did -- I didn't hate it, but it never grabbed me).