Book notes

The US cover of Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey may be the ugliest thing I've ever seen on a book. The UK version is rather easier on the eye.

Books on my buy-in-paperback list for which the announcement of the MMPB seems to be overdue: Karl Schroeder's Pirate Sun, Tobias Buckell's Sly Mongoose.

ETA: Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention about Michelle Sagara's Cast in Silence, which is obviously not the author's fault but kept tripping me up; for some reason, at least in the trade edition, it's typeset without the fi and fl ligatures. That's not something one often sees in professional publication.

On a more cheerful note

I went for a nice walk in the sunshine this lunchtime. I saw a cardinal in passing, a flash of scarlet disappearing into the bushes, and a rose or two in bloom, and a family of European sparrows came for the crumbs from my sandwich, darting in to snatch a bit and then jumping back to what they thought was a safe distance.