books

I recently ordered a book^[1] via amazon.com, or rather, from Warehouse Deals, Inc., one of the zShops at amazon.com. In their own words, Warehouse Deals, Inc. is:

… an Amazon.com subsidiary. We offer open box, refurbished, and slightly damaged merchandise at reduced prices with the benefits of Amazon.com fulfillment and customer service. Satisfaction is guaranteed!

It sounded like a good deal. Getting the book from them shaved nearly $15 off the price, and yet amazon.com would actually be fulfilling the order? Cool.

The book arrived a few days after I ordered it, as I’ve pretty much come to expect from amazon.com. As they filled the order, it came in the usual amazon.com box. However, something was a bit - off. Observe:

Looks pretty normal, right? But wait… what’s up with the rubber band? That’s a new feature. Let’s see how things look on the flip side (literally). Aha!

Apparently, they figured out that if they just replaced a big swath of packing tape with one rubber band, they’d save millions of dollars in the long run. Unfortunately, one rubber band isn’t quite as secure. That is, it’s not secure at all. I’m glad I’m a nerd; if there’d been something in there that someone normal would actually want, I probably would have received an empty box. My rubber band might have even been gone!

Bad, amazon.com! Bad!

1. Using French, for those of you who’re interested. More of my foreign language geekery over here. [↩]

Shortly after the end of spring semester, I started getting the fantasy itch - after all of the nonfiction reading I’d been doing, I needed something with orcs, elves, and swords. Along with installing Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2 on my PC^[1], I picked up some books that take place in the Forgotten Realms setting^[2]. I picked up all three books of the Dark Elf Trilogy, by R. A. Salvatore, as well as the Annotated Elminster, by Ed Greenwood.

I’ve thus far finished the first book of the Dark Elf Trilogy, Homeland. It was a fun read, but it could have been better; there were some things in it that drove me a bit bonkers, to be honest. One in particular? Salvatore’s (over)usage of varied tag lines in dialogue. In a short guide for writing dialogue, the guide at fictionwriting.about.com wrote:

6. Don’t try too hard to vary your tag lines when writing dialogue.
Veering too much beyond “he said/she said” only draws attention to the tags. Readers tend to read over these phrases anyway, whereas obvious efforts to insert variety, through words such as “interjected,” “counseled,” or “conceded,” draw the reader out of the action. If the writer is doing his or her work, the reader is already aware that the speaker is interjecting, counseling, or conceding. The writer won’t have to say it again in the tag.

I’ve seen this advice elsewhere on the ‘net, and it’s true - while you’d think “he / she said” over and over would get old, it really doesn’t. We’re used to it, we see it, we skim it, it’s gone - all we’re really taking in are the words that the characters are speaking. This is infinitely better than the reader stumbling over different (and at times peculiar!) tag words repeatedly.

Salvatore’s evil dark elf characters “said” a lot, but they also “grumbled” and “mumbled” a good deal. The two tag words that topped the charts, though? Snapped and growled. While I’m sure my perception of them was exaggerated due to some mild frustration on my part, I would have swore that one of these words adorned every single page of the book. Had they been used once or twice in the whole book, they would have caught my attention and given weight to the dialogue. Instead, due to how often I saw them, I started to think - do dark elves have a bit of canine DNA in them or something? They sure do growl and snap a lot…

I’m 15 pages or so into Exile, book 2 of the trilogy; we’ll see if the growls and snaps scare me away. Please, future fiction writers - go easy on such things.

1. Yes, I’ve played these before. No, my love affair with them will never truly end [↩]
2. The Forgotten Realms is one of the Dungeons and Dragons settings. More info can be had here. [↩]

I wrote a couple of days ago about having some serious problems with getting started on a term paper for one of my classes. Things with it have moved forward a bit, and so I wanted to toss an update out:

I now have enough material to write the paper. However, only one of my sources is an article; the other two are books. Therein was my problem before. In a previous class with this professor, he specifically stated: articles only. In this class, he focused on getting everyone in the class up to speed with the school’s article databases, but, in hindsight, he didn’t specifically say that we had to use articles only.

I met with him last Friday and had him look over what I had. He came to the same conclusion I had come to: while each individual article would have been fine to use, they didn’t come together very well at all. While they all dealt with intelligence or espionage, they dealt with different spheres of it. His recommendation? Take one of the articles and get two books that the author of the article had cited repeatedly.

I ended up hurting myself by focusing so much on scholarly articles; while they were stressed much more over books (books were more or less not mentioned in class), I could have gone to the professor sooner and asked. Hell, my paper would be written if I’d done that; I had three different books on the influence that the American Revolution exerted on European countries! To be fair, though, he recognized that he’d stressed articles as well, and he’s going to alter the syllabus for later sessions of the class, to clarify that any academic source can be used - articles, books, etc.

As an aside to all of this, it’s funny how so many people have the peculiar idea that “history is done” - that is, there’s nothing to study per se, if you want to know something, you go and look it up in a book. While this is true for a lot of history, most - all, even - of our history can be expanded upon, and in some specific areas, there’s simply nothing written at all. While there are some books on espionage during the Revolutionary War period, there’s a relative dearth of academic articles on the topic.

I mentioned in my last post that “two weeks to find a rare book and to have it delivered from over 4000 miles away isn’t too bad at all!” I still stand by that. However, it’s even better for it to only take 8 days total to go from looking for a rare book to having it arrive at your house; my copy of Russisch ohne Mühe arrived today, and I’m ecstatic. It does indeed seem far superior to the “new and improved” Russisch ohne Mühe Heute, just as I’ve read in language learning forums.

I’m quite ecstatic about the book, as well as the quick delivery. While I touted the wonders of the internet (which I still hold to be true, mind you), I was secretly concerned about something more “worldly”: international shipping hell. I’ve heard my fair share of horror stories about packages that were supposed to hop the pond, and I was really hoping that my book’s voyage didn’t become one of those stories. Obviously, it didn’t.

Lastly, my family thinks I’m a total geek (which I agree with), and perhaps mildly insane (which I can’t totally argue with, at least not all of the time). There’s something über-geeky about excitedly saying, “Excellent! My German-based Russian text has arrived!” Oh well.

I seem to go in cycles; I’ll go for a long period of time not really thinking about the internet and how it’s changed things, and then out of nowhere, I’ll get a slap of reality. My cheek is still stinging a bit from earlier this week.

I recently was hunting a particular book, Russisch ohne Mühe, or Russian without Toil. It’s one of the older courses made by a company called Assimil, and is supposed to be far superior to their modern, “updated” Russisch ohne Mühe heute (Russian without Toil Today). This particular book was first printed in 1971, and as far as I know, Assimil no longer publishes it; they’ve abandoned it entirely in favor of their updated course.

Furthermore, it wasn’t exactly at the top of the bestseller lists when it was new. Let’s face it, the consumer demand for a product which teaches Russian with a German base can’t be that great. However, it actually surprised me just how few copies are floating around. WorldCat, while certainly not exhaustive in regards to libraries, lists a mere three copies worldwide.^[1]

However, despite its relative rarity, as I type this post, the book is on its way to me. It’s coming from a small bookseller in Germany, who sells at a site called booklooker.de. I found her and booklooker.de via bookfinder.com. Finding the book was only the first step though, of course; she of course had to be paid, too! Being in Germany, she obviously wanted to be paid in Euros. I was able to do so by paying her via PayPal; they took care of the conversion stuff for me. Instantly, of course, with no charge added.

All of this sounds rather run of the mill for the internet, which, ultimately, I suppose it is - but when I stopped and thought about what I was able to do and how easy it was, it made me shake my head. Before the internet, how in the world would I have found a now out-of-print book in Germany? If I had been able to find it - which is unlikely to begin with - how long would it have taken? How long would it have taken from the beginning of my search to me actually getting the book? For my recent transaction, assuming the book doesn’t get lost and shows up in the approximate timeframe given, the entire process - from finding the book to it showing up in my mailbox - will amount to a couple of weeks. Two weeks to find a rare book and to have it delivered from over 4000 miles away isn’t too bad at all!

This whole experience has also brought to my mind a big question which I touched on above: before the internet, how did people find rare or out-of-print books? Were there services that would contact a range of used book sellers to find out if the book was available? Did you have to do this yourself? Did you just not get the book, period? In the case of this book, I think even if book-hunt services existed, it would have been difficult to get the book. There were two sellers at booklooker.de who had the book; the one I bought from, while she had 15,000 books listed, specifically stated that to stop by her place and see her books required an appointment, which leads me to believe that she just has a bunch of books in storage, rather than a physical shop. The other guy? He had 3 items listed; he wasn’t really a shopkeeper of any sort, just some guy who threw a few items online to try and sell them. In either case, I think they would have both been overlooked by a book-hunt service.

1. Which are, oddly enough, in the Netherlands, where Dutch is the official language, not German. [↩]