Skip to main content

Birthday Book 2020

I reserved my copy of Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir at the only Barnes-N-Noble in Omaha.  It will be released on 4 August.  I asked the book seller questions about when it will arrive just to make sure I can pick up the copy before my birthday.  I told him it will be my birthday book.  He asked me how old I will be and I told my age without enthusiasm.  Then we chit chatted about life and getting older.

So I will receive an email when the store receives the books.  They will receive five copies and one of those is reserved under my name.  The book seller told me to come in when I get the email and they will be more than happy to pull it from the box for me.  I am happy.

This book will break a few of my birthday book rules.  One, at five hundred pages it is much longer than the normal 150-200 page book.  Two, it is the middle book of a trilogy.  The birthday book is supposed a stand alone novella and preferably by someone I have never read before.  It is supposed to promote finding out new authors.  Something I have been do already this year.

But due to the issues of selecting the birthday book due to the pandemic and the date of release for the book, I will make this exception.  It also helps that this is one of my most anticipated books of the year.

Recently I found out that the author lives and works in Oxford.  It makes me smile to think while I was walking around Oxford listening to Gideon the Ninth, the author was just a stone’s throw away.

Gideon the Ninth surpassed Dracula in my top ten books (a list that I actually never made).  Frankenstein is probably number one, I can’t see another book beating that.  A few years ago, probably more than a decade ago, publishers actually released an unedited version.  Mary Shelley’s husband Percy Shelley actually edited the book and added his poet flare to the manuscript.  I imagine that unedited version would read more like The Mortal Immortal, a novella Mary wrote after Percy’s death.

Anyway, I’m excited to get my hands Harrow the Ninth.  I will be taking days off for my birthday and so I may yet finish the book within the week I give myself to finish the birthday book.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trends on Horror

Here are some trends I picked up on recently. The big push for horror isn’t in October.  It’s June, July and August.  As someone who self publishes books, I’m not at all interested in what’s trending.  Mainly because I just need to write as many and publish as many books as possible.  Following trends gets thrown out the window when you want to publish four to six books a year. I already knew that books and dvds, perhaps most streaming get released on Tuesdays.  At one time I knew why. It was the whole business of everything getting shifted because of the pandemic that I realized that the push for horror was June through August.  Harrow the Ninth was supposed to be released in 25 June and now is 4 August.  The Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones was supposed to be released on 14 July and is now 1 September.  That was supposed to be my Birthday book this year. What I found out about Stephen Graham Jones is that a novel of his should have already been released, but i
Post a Comment
Read more

my first and only read of The Deathly Hallows

When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, I lived in Korea.  There is a fourteen hour time difference between Seoul and Omaha.  I went to the book store on the day it was released, like when the book store opened and bought my copy.  I started to read it on the bus ride home.  When I got to my apartment, I read it that day plus the day after.  I was determined to be the first in my family to have finished the book.  I ordered take out from the restaurant on the first floor of my apartment building and snacked on stuff I already had.  The book came out on a Saturday, which is unusual because books are normally released on a Tuesday.  I had no contact with the rest of the world, well accept for when I skyped my mother on our weekly calls.  I read the 700+ page book in two days.  And that was all I did that weekend.  When I finished book, I couldn't actually see that well, like everything was a blur for the two days that followed.  It was the last time I read a large book w
Post a Comment
Read more

The Stone of Destiny

The other movie I watched this weekend was also a biopic: The Stone of Destiny .  It was about four Scottish college students who went to Westminster Abby and stole a six hundred pound stone, which was a Scottish treasure.  I enjoyed it.  A bunch of Scottish students banding together to steal a national treasure back from the English. The movie was based off of a book, the writer was the leader of this little band.  After the events of the book, he went on to become a lawyer.  They pull off the heist and a few months later they returned the stone.  All involved were accused of stealing the stone, but never charged.  England was worried that if they charged the students with the theft of the stone, there would be riots by the Scottish and so dropped the charges.
Post a Comment
Read more