Title, free to good home

Courtesy of a misread Amazon page:

A Moon Called Paperback

(no subject)

I had a bookstore accident today. It does happen occasionally; the really surprising thing is that it doesn't happen more often, when I go into the campus bookstore nearly every weekday. Usually I just look, but today I went in hoping for Throne of Jade, didn't find it, and came out with four other books instead, three of them by authors new to me. (The other one being Jared Diamond's Collapse; I own a slightly scrambled copy of Guns, Germs and Steel back in Sheffield, but have never gotten around to reading it.)

My latest Amazon order arrived, too; maps of Romania and Beijing. The Romania looks surprisingly densely inhabited, except for the mountains; a webwork of roads and railways and little towns. (Most of what I know about Romania comes from Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy, which I read after it was televized in the late 1980s).

The September conference in Romania is billed as Wednesday-Saturday, but it turns out that the agenda for Saturday is a (daylight) tour of Dracula's castle. Decisions, decisions; go home on the Saturday and go to church with my mother on Sunday, which isn't something I get to do nearly as often as I'd like, or indulge in a bit of once-in-a-lifetime tourism?