Bill Roper's Journal

I had heard for years that there was more to Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast" than had actually hit the presses. The suggestion that this material might actually get included in the Virginia Edition was one of the things that convinced me to go ahead and buy it.

Of course, it didn't end up there, but the full run of Heinlein juveniles made good bedtime reading for K for a long period of time. I need to get those back from her...

Anyway, it turns out that the material is an alternate version of about 3/4 of "The Number of the Beast", telling a completely different story starting about 1/4 of the way into the book. It has finally escaped into print and a copy of the novel, "The Pursuit of the Pankera", is sitting on my desk taunting me.

I have a great many things that I need to be doing.

And this is probably the only bit of original Heinlein that I haven't read.

Decisions, decisions...

I finished reading Tunnel In the Sky to Katie last week. Now we are on to Citizen of the Galaxy. Katie is not at all happy about what has happened to Baslim...

Katie and Julie's team had their first scheduled softball game of the season today. Sadly, they lost 3-1, but they played hard and well.

In other news, I finished reading the third of the Karres novels to Katie before we left for FKO, so I had to find a new book to start on last night. Happily, I already had a book in mind that Katie proceeded to agree to, so we are now reading Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey. :)

I am now four chapters into reading A Wrinkle In Time to Katie and Julie, at the rate of one chapter per night.

Katie is finding this pace annoyingly slow. :)

I went down and continued the assault on the bookcases in the living room that daisy_knotwise had been working on earlier in the day as she went through the two shelves of children's books. They were divided into piles to keep and piles to donate.

Nine boxes later, the bookshelves are still not empty. And we are rapidly running out of "small" boxes.

I would really like to avoid buying another bundle of small boxes. We'll see. I found one more empty in the basement, so that gives us three...

(I love my 1968 Britannica. And Gretchen's collection of the old Time/Life Science series. I really do. But, *sheesh*...)

Space Cat by Ruthven Todd was one of daisy_knotwise's favorite books when she was a small child. It's about a cat, Flyball (who you may have heard of in "Library Song"), who comes along on the first trip to the Moon.

The original book was long since lost, but we've got a much more recent printing that Gretchen acquired a few years ago. I found it when cleaning up the office looking for the title. (You remember the missing title, don't you? Still missing...)

And thus over the last few days, I've read the book to Katie.

And Katie was absolutely charmed and delighted.

Ok, so I've just finished reading all four books of Lois Bujold's The Sharing Knife series. And having done so, I've concluded that I wasn't actually reading a fantasy series. I was reading an SF series with fantasy trappings.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.
( No real spoilers, but just in case... )

If you click on this link, you'll find a report on an interview with J.K. Rowling where she goes into a bit more detail about what happens to everyone mentioned in the epilogue to Deathly Hallows.

But you really shouldn't do it until you actually read the epilogue unless you enjoy spoilers. :)

daisy_knotwise and I have been kicking Deathly Hallows about now that she's finished it. In a completely spoiler-free fashion, I've arrived at an observation about Slytherin House, catalyzed by some additional discussion over in allisona's journal:

Gryffindor and Slytherin are both intended to produce leaders. It's just that they produce different kinds of leaders, both useful in the right circumstance. The leaders from Gryffindor are the boss that you love to work for, while the leaders from Slytherin are the boss that you hate to work for.

Sometimes you need Winston Churchill, but other times you need George Patton to get the job done.

I'm done.