Okay, for a moment there I thought I was going to have something to add, as I've just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife. But it turns out Debet and Kate have said exactly what I thought. I loved it. Even my grandmother, who doesn't like science fiction or any of that weird stuff, loved it, so it must be a pretty widely appealing book.

OK Buffista advice. I just finished the first draft of a book on solutions to global warming. It adds up a lot of different techniques to show how we could eliminate nearly 100% of net carbon emissions. To do this it it has to wander fairly far afield - into no-till agriculture, building techniques that require less wood, cement and metal and so forth.

I was thinking adding a text reminder to the page footer - showing the cumulative total, right next to the page number, - so you could always glance down and see that you are at 10% of emission eliminated, 20% , 30% etc...

I even thought briefly of using a discreet graphic - a thermeter or such. But I doubt a publisher would like the idea of a graphical page header or footer, and anyway I suspect it would make the layout too busy.

But having a little text note alongside the page number - good idea? bad idea?

Thanks.

Might work, if it's clear, doesn't clutter the page, and is explained at the beginning.

I think it could work. Maybe not by the page number, but the opposite (ie-if the pg number is at the top, put the % at the bottom.)

Am-Chau, I have other interesting things to say about the book, I just didn't want to be spoily, but if you want to discuss, I'm more than game.

Oh, hey, I know her! Sort of.

Yeah, I knew the name looked familiar when my friend gave me the book, and then I realized she was on LJ, so I stopped by and left her a little "hey, your book is really awesome!" note.

Quick question for the literary hivemind: I'm working on a care package for my National Guard nephew in Baghdad. My plan is to stuff a flat-rate priority envelope as full as I can get it, so I'm thinking a magazine or two and a slim paperback in addition to a letter. Problem is, since Nathan lives in Georgia and I live in Washington, we don't see that much of each other, so I'm not sure what he reads. Obviously, y'all don't know him at all, but I'm just looking for ideas of authors who don't write chick books and who write something slim enough for the envelope--no doorstop fantasy tomes of the type I favor when I venture into more masculine literary territory. Something where if I guess wrong and he doesn't want to read it, he won't have any trouble finding a taker for it.

Douglas Adams? Small books, funny, non-gendered.

Ernest Hemingway. Anyway, he's brief. The Sun Also Rises.

An older YA action classic -- YA tends to be brief, and is easy to get into. The Smugglers is a pirate novel, very exciting, by an author I can't remember. Of course, the paperbacks of these go out of print like the world is ending.

One of those popular history volumes out in trade paperback -- I don't know how thick they are, but the one about salt, or Krakatoa, or longitude?

Conventional wisdom for boys you don't know is to give them popular non-fiction.

Susan, I'd suggest something by Gary Paulsen. He writes a lot of YA, slanted for boys, but Winterdance is one of the most hysterically funny things I've ever read. DH laughed so hard he teared up and he almost rolled off the couch. The book has the advantage of being so far outside the experience of southerners as to lend an extra layer of absurdity to the story. Paulsen's other work is readable, but more in the "triumph over adversity" vein for kids. Winterdance is available in TP, which would fit your envelope nicely, I think.

That's a good idea, Katie, and should definitely be available at any B&N.

(ETA--thanks for the other ideas, too. I'll take a list with me.)