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[sclerotia.livejournal.com]

When I de-lurked about a month ago, I had intended to join in on the chat the next day and generally become a contributing member of the group. Well our very slow dial up connection can’t handle the chat, so you won’t be seeing me there. Then I read in the back log that there was a reading list in the back of the new-cover-Thief, so I found the list and ordered them out from the library. Between my own collection, the library system in the medium sized town where I work, and the library district where I live, I could find nearly all of them. Unfortunately, since they were all older books and not new and hot items, I didn't have to wait for them; they arrived at my local branch library (only 4 miles away in the small town nearest me) in two days; unfortunate because only a few days before I had picked up about 10 books I had requested. I was now awash in words and sinking fast. I have been reading in every spare moment and a lot that weren’t spare, but stolen, and have read through all the library books, but the ones in my own collection I have set aside for the moment.

I also found, that having decided years ago that a good book was better, and having ceded all but the most minimal claim to computer time at home, it was not easy to reclaim much of that time from the competing interests of my husband and my son, so you may not “see” me all that often. (Today I am taking off to have lunch with a friend, a librarian with similar tastes in books, who usually has the first Friday of the month off; naturally, we spend some of our time making book recommendations to each other. Needless to say I have not yet gotten to any of the ones she recommended to me last month. My son, out of school for the summer now, will sleep ‘til noon and my husband is at work, so until I go to meet my friend I can have the computer to myself. Yea!!)

All that aside:

1. If anyone mentioned this already, I missed it, but Lloyd Alexander died on May 17th.

2. Also, if this has been covered before I apologize, but there is a fairly recent book--one of the ones I have been wading through--The Wand in the Word; Conversations with Writers of Fantasy compiled and edit by Leonard S. Marcus. It features writers of J/YA fantasy. Intended for youngish readers, there is not a lot of depth to the interviews, but I enjoyed them, nonetheless. No, our esteemed author is not one of them, but the following are: Lloyd Alexander, Franny Billingsly, Susan Cooper, Nancy Farmer, Brian Jacques, Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula Le Guin, Madeleine l’Engle, Garth Nix, Tamora Pierce, Terry Prachett, Philip Pullman, and Jane Yolen.

3. Regarding tributes, I couldn’t find these on any of the previous posts I read, although I may have missed them:

Very near the end of Suttcliff’s Warior Scarlet, Drem tells Brai, “I am not kind.”

In The Crime of Martin Coverly, when Nickolas is imprisoned, condemned to the gallows, and hears the door, he asks, “Is it time?”. Also from The Crime of Martin Coverly I jotted down a couple of other things, although I am not sure, now, exactly what they referred to. These aren’t word-for-word quoted in KoA but they are quite similar to a couple of things. “dark blood flowing in rivulets between his fingers” and, and I think this was in regards to the map, “the best way to hide something is to expose it openly”.

4. Also regarding tributes: Mark of the Horse Lords is not one of the books I have been able to get hold of…yet. I understand that the fibula pin features in it. I have wondered if the description of Costis’ pin which has a “shaft four inches long and as thick as a cornstalk” is directly from Mark of the Horse Lords. In the US the general definition of corn to mean “grain” is only survives in a couple of uses, e.g. corned beef (using grains of salt) and corns on the feet (a sort of granular callus). Unless we are consciously writing for an international audience, “corn” is used to mean maize, so a cornstalk would be something an inch and a half thick. Clearly MWT didn’t mean maize. My own inclination, assuming that I had come up with the comparison on my own, would have been to compare the thickness to a “stalk of wheat” or “stalk of barley”, so I have been curious since I read this line why she decided to use “cornstalk” there. If it were one of her tributes, that would explain it nicely. Let me know please. Thanks
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I apologize for the length of this. Although I have read the instructions for making an lj-cut several times I have not yet been able to figure it out yet. If someone wants to describe the process in a manner that a three year old could understand, I would be grateful. As I drive to work I write mental letters to my friends and, now, posts for this comm. I seldom actually get them written down, but if I ever do, and if I don’t figure out how to make the cuts……