Sir Bedivere

Yes! Thank you, Ginger's spicy brains!

I'm waiting for the library to pry the last Robin Hobb book out of the wretched fingers of whoever keeps forgetting to return them. I was so desperate I checked the local Barnes & Noble, but they didn't have it. A shelf and a half of Laurell K. Hamilton, but not one copy of "Fool's Fate"! Ahhh!

I wonder if he'll wind up with 5 books rather than 4?

1300 pages is almost twice as long as the others, no?

I've nevre read anything of Martin's, but I did carry around one of his books all day once, getting an autograph for my flatmate. I think it was Volume 1 of some series, and even that was big enough to bludgeon somebody with.

There is a limit beyond which a book cannot be bound, after which you'd have to go to a bigger trim size, thinner paper, or two volumes, but I don't know that it's happened in hardcover recently. Usually, the editor comes in with the mighty cluestick and says, "Keep this draft for the Ultimate Edition in ten years. Now, cut 500 pages for a realistic edition."

I was thinking that too, that his editor may have chopped the book in half. The series wasn't supposed to be this long in the first place, I don't think. I remember some discussion a while back about George discovering that writing a big historical fantasy trilogy was ::hard:: and the only way out was more books.

I believe that Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars series was originally supposed to be a trilogy and we are now waiting for the sixth book in the series. (Out in the UK this summer.) And there is going to be a book seven (as I just discovered on her website!)

Wasn't Brust's last Phoenix Guard book chopped in two, for length and for fear of putting divots in tile flooring when dropped? Not that I'm complaining--the more Brust prose the better.

The last book of Tad Williams' "Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn" trilogy was published in two paperback pieces.

I remember that, Dana. The hardcover was one volume, though. I think it was font size that let him get away with it -- with the same font, you can fit way more characters onto an average HC page than onto a mass market page.

I'm currently reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, and loving it. He does a wonderful job of building a different universe with its own rules and physics and expectations, and doing it solidly enough that it's very real and compelling.

Oh, I should check this out. There was a story by him in the McSweeney's collection of Astonishing Tales or whatever, and I really liked it. This is the real reason I like reading short story compiliations -- finding new authors!

Also, I just read Paladin of Souls over the weekend, and DAMN. The girl on the bus next to me noticed I was reading it, and wanted to talk Bujold, but I just needed to finish the damn book.

Has anyone ever been so bugged by a book's typeface that they can't read it?

On two occasions I've requested books from my library that they only had in large print. I ended up skimming both books because the font annoyed me so much, not for its largeness per se (it looks like TNR14, which is a nice readable font in doublespaced manuscript format), but because there weren't enough words on each line, nor enough space between the lines for so large a font size. It threw off my reading rhythm. Mind you, I'm glad large print exists, but I don't like it for my own use. I may in 40 years or so.

Another one of my library books is printed in a strange font with the tiniest serifs I've ever seen. It's also a bit larger than I'm used to, causing the same problem as the large print books where the size of the type seems out of proportion to the spaces between the lines. And I don't know if I can bring myself to read it, even though that feels like the stupidest reason ever for bailing on a book! But I don't want to constantly think about the font and the way my eyeballs track across the page while I'm reading, either.