The robin arrived a while before Christmas, and I set it aside to be read when I finished the fruitcakes, then forgot about it.
In case of loss, I've scanned Patricia's letter
and posted it on an unlinked page on Dave's server
at
I intend to forward Patricia's letter to Harold, and send copies of this letter to both Patricia and Harold so that our robinmaster will know what is going on.
We went to Australia -- something Dave has wanted to do ever since he was a little boy -- not too long after Harry Potter came out, and I scored a copy of _Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone_ in an airport bookshop. I haven't had access to un-mangled copies of any of the subsequent volumes, and I'm not interested enough to figure out how to buy from Amazon.uk.
I wonder how an author of Rowling's clout got suckered into signing on with Scholastic?
There's a family legend that one of our ancestors might have been an aboriginal American, but there's no place for it in the genealogy. Dad came of the branch of the family that stayed put on Old Ben's homestead.
Mom's side hasn't been traced, but we're pretty sure it was Irish.
I haven't time to read much fiction except for works in progress that are posted on Baen's Bar for comment. I did check a couple of Bujold's Penric books out of the library a few weeks ago. I would read the rest, but the library hasn't got them and our bookstore went broke.
I once read quite a lot of the Darkover books; I liked them enough to read around the bits that smell tainted. I just checked the online catalog: the library has quite a few MZB books I haven't read, and at least one of them isn't an e-book. I refuse to check out an e-book when I could download it instead.
I wish people could download the e-book I wrote, but the only way I know of is to make it into a zip file. I write more nearly every day, and I'm usually behind on one of the on-site back-ups. A zip file fresh enough to be any use just isn't going to happen.
(Oddly, the off-site backups are much easier to make than copying the files to another computer in the same room. Copying to another drive in the same computer is almost automatic.)
On further poking, several MZB books are books, and many of those are Darkover. I may make a detour on my way back from Goodwill Friday. We cleaned up the garage today, so I can find the stuff I mean to get rid of, so I may actually go this time. A ten-mile bike ride over well-kept streets is just right for coming-back-from-the- winter exercise. But the more I need exercise, the less inclined I am to take it.
I have mixed feelings about McCaffrey. I love the stories, but her well-furnished planets keep kicking me in the willing suspension of disbelief. In the early stories, the weyrs are so well suited for humans and dragons, with the large caves up top, with convenient perches, and all the lower caves human scale, everything connected by hallways, and hot and cold running water laid on, that it's obvious the ancestors did it with Clarke magic. But then she wrote the origin story, and the refugees just found the caves already built and furnished.
In another story, a group of prisoners and captives are dumped on a random spot on a newly- discovered planet to find out whether it's habitable. They wake up in a field of ripe grain -- not just any grain, but a high-gluten grain that can be used exactly like good hard bread wheat. All the zillions of grains on Earth, and all but *one* have to be eaten as porridge or tortillas. Not only that, but this field is *not* irrigated; it rains here often enough that the grain flourishes unattended. Yet there is an outcrop of food-grade baking soda within walking distance.
It's been a long time since I read a Norton book — because I've read all of them, and some of the "collaborations". I have a collection of paperback Nortons, but all I can find is _The Eye of the Monster_. Time to extend the garage cleaning into the library.