Spring retreat

[altivo]

No, I don't mean a trip to Florida. I mean that we have a new winter storm watch. And on the radars it looks as if New England is getting plastered right now by a different system. Current forecast for my location says six inches of snow tomorrow night and possibly a bit more during the day on Friday. We'd just finally gotten rid of most of the dirty old snow on the ground, so I guess someone figured we needed a nice new layer.

At work people have started asking to be on the request queue for Christopher Paolini's third book in the Inheritance series, Brisingr, which isn't due out until mid September, so I set up the waiting list to keep them happy. Our regular bookseller is estimating the price of the book at $67.47. I assume they think it will be two volumes each the size of the seventh Harry Potter book. That's the only way the publishers could justify such a price. We got the paperwork for the preorder a couple of weeks ago and it included pages of legal contract and promises not to let anything out of our hands before the official release date. The legal verbiage exceeded that required for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The latter was a fair bomb of a book in my opinion, hardly worth the paper it was printed on. I don't expect Brisingr to be any better, alas.

Comments

[lobowolf.livejournal.com]

Sheesh, for that price, you would have thought they would have been able to afford an extra "e" for the title.

I hope you don't plan on sending that next storm up here, 'cause it's already pouring buckets and we don't want any more snow!!!!

If I ever see the bare ground again, I'm going to put on my Pope outfit on and go kiss it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Judging by the path visible on the map just now, it's traveling from NW to SE and won't pass near you at all for a change.

You don't need a Pope outfit though. You just need to join us pn0ys. We kiss the ground all the time. ;p

[calydor.livejournal.com]

That's "Brisingr", with only one s.

*cough*

Anyway, that price sounds absolutely insane for a book, even for one people have been waiting for for a long time by now.

[foozzzball.livejournal.com]

Well bombs are expensive! :D

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Fixed, thanks for pointing it out. I was half asleep when I wrote that post.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

It's not just Illinois: I'm in Winston-Salem, NC at the moment, and we're getting hammered.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

With snow?

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

That sneaky "Web 2.0" with it's missing vocals, there's Flickr, Tumblr, Blubrry... Would Brisingr then belong to "Book 2.0"?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I hope it isn't a trend, though. Eldest was so bad I couldn't get through it. I probably won't even bother with this one.

[hrrunka]

Is that a special price for libraries? Eragon I only read to see whether it was as bad as the movie suggested. I did get to the end, but I've no interest in picking up any sequels, and I presume they won't be making Eldest into a movie.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

No, it's apparently a data entry error on the part of Baker & Taylor. Nothing new about that. Random House/Knopf says that the expected price of the book is $27.50 and it will be 896 pages long.

[hrrunka]

Oh dear. Nearly 900 pages? Is the editing of novels a lost art? I have read all the Harry Potter novels including The Deathly Hallows, and the last four (at least) felt not so much padded out as over-stuffed...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way, at least about these two authors.

I wouldn't have suggested that Tolkien edit out any of his work, though.

[hrrunka]

Oh, I suspect Lord of the Rings would have been an un-readable ten volume 8000+ page door-stopper if published using the literary editing standards of today...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. Not with JRR doing his own editing. That's why it took him so long. He polished and polished until there was only the hard gemstone left.

Have you ever seen the set of posthumous manuscripts that his son put out? These were papers that he had directed should be destroyed after his death, but the family didn't agree, thank goodness. They're fascinating, but it runs to 12 volumes of fine print. I have the whole set and have plowed through most of it. If he had lived another sixty years,The Silmarillion might have been a trilogy about the size of LoTR and equal in magnificence. What was actually published was a rush job, just a "selection".

[hrrunka]

...assuming his publisher wasn't chivvying him along to get stuff into print long before the editing was properly done, of course. I doubt the current crop of over-long poorly-edited tomes is entirely the authors' fault.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, Tolkien had been editing the Silmarillion for so long that it went back to before the Hobbit was published. Yes, he was undoubtedly under pressure from all directions to get something to print once the slowly building success of LoTR peaked in the early 70s. I suspect he finally gave in and released what was published more because he needed the cash infusion than anything else. Last year's book, The Children of Hérin, was a lightly edited version of one of those old manuscripts.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Children of Húrin that is. Never fails, hurry and don't proofread and there's a big fat typo.

[calydor.livejournal.com]

Brisingr is the Elven word for 'fire'. It is important to note that Paolini borrowed inspiration for the Elven language not from Tolkien, but from Icelandic, which has grammar different from English. In Icelandic, 'ngr' is a 'proper' word ending, if I'm not very mistaken.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Is that another popular series?
I can't say I've heard of that one.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's the trilogy that begins with Eragon, and continues with Eldest. They made Eragon into a movie that was even worse than the book in my opinion.

Paolini is very young, and his work is extremely derivative. If he keeps writing, he may well become a notable author, but in my opinion he hasn't reached that point yet in spite of plenty of sales.