how peculiar

How peculiar. Email in my inbox from Steven Brust and Patrick Nielsen Hayden inside the same thirty days. Granted, because I emailed them both on different topics, but none the less, very peculiar.

I emailed PNH because I started reading this copy of Amnesia Moon that Trent sent me. I got to page 24, and the book started over. I mean, entirely. Title page, dedication page, copyright page, everything exactly replicated except for the author’s signature on the main title page. When it reached page 24 again, the next page was 57.

So I went and looked all over the net to see if this was a common error or if by some mad chance Jonathan Lethem, who is the author and who is a little weird, had possibly done this on purpose. I couldn’t find anything on the net. So after looking for an hour, I emailed PNH and TNH to ask about it, because it’s a Tor book. Mostly to find out if, like, the whole batch had turned out like that or if I’d just gotten lucky, rather than trying to get a new copy, since it’s apparently still in print. Anyway, PNH emailed back and said it was probably a bindery error (which I’d gleaned from reading the Tor site, but I still thought it odd to find no mention on the net) and to give him my address and he’d see about getting me a new copy.

The thing I think is _really_ peculiar is that Trent sent me this dysfunctional copy. I mean, I gather he’s read the book, and since he stuffed it in the box of Buffy tapes, I’m assuming he read this *copy*, rather than going out and fetching me a new one, but why on earth would you send a person a book with twenty-five missing pages if you’d read the book?

Of course, it was published in 1996, so maybe he’d read it a long time ago and had forgotten it was broken.

In other news, we went to Treasure Planet today, and I really enjoyed it a great deal. I thought it was a very nice adaptation, and I thought it was by *far* the best blend of traditional and computer animation I’ve seen. (Generally I loathe combining traditonal and computer animation; it looks tremendously clunky and fakey to me, because they’re two entirely different mediums, but this was _very_ nicely done.) Then we rented (well, several things, but relevantly for the evening) The Legend of Bagger Vance, which I also quite enjoyed. I’m not sure why the critics panned it so much; Charlize Theron was sort of awful in places, and it wasn’t exactly action-filled, but for pity’s sake, it’s a movie about golf. And I liked it. So there! Ahem. :)

And, er, um. Oh! Mom finished re-covering our couch, so now instead of a blue 3 cushion couch, we have a kahki … khaki? Kakhi? You get the idea. Two cushion couch! I’ll take a picture tomorrow. :)

(I’m feeling better, if you couldn’t tell.)

2 thoughts on “how peculiar

  1. Khaki.

    Do you think I could borrow your Mum? I am now the proud owner of a 2-seater sofabed in need of re-covering and Lord knows when I’ll have time… :)

    Trent probably went out & bought himself another copy, forgot why, and then thought “I have two of these, I’ll send one to Kit”.

  2. I think, actually, that I read the book five years ago when I bought it and went back to the bookstore and said ‘Hey, where’s this chunk of pages?’ They explained that the whole batch was like that, so I made up those 25 pages in my head. Now I have to re-read it, I’m sure.

    But I like the other theory better.

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