Prometheus 6

This might be long and I really don't know if this is something folks can comment on, so you can treat this as an open thread.

One of the things I do quarterly is kick out for my daughter's textbooks. Since she started letting me know she could use some help, anyway...she's the stubbornly independant type. This year, one day before hitting the campus bookstore, he face exploded. A major dental thing...there was no way she could leave the house. So I went to pick up her books for her. No biggie...I'm paying anyway so I was going anyway. I just go by myself, is all.

And, of course, get one $106.00 book wrong. Not my fault, I swear. I asked for help and the staff person got the worng book for me. Ariel doesn't find this out until she starts reading the current assignment (yes, swollen face, fever and everything, she got the assignments and started working on them).

When she gets to class, somehow or other there are buyable books near her classroom so she gets the right one. Thing is, she needs my credit card to get an actual refund. And I was literally heading out the door when she called to tell me about the problem.

Barnes and Nobles actually run the campus bookstore, and since I was not going to make it before the joint closed. So we decided I would just give her cash for the new book ($56) and she would get a B & N store credit for the returned book since I hit the bookstores kind of heavily during Black History Month anyway.

So today I go to the local B & N and find nothing historical that I want to read. Nothing. Popular non-fiction wasn't looking too good anyway (Larry Elder's book has a title that should get the shit slapped out of him). Then it dawned on me.

Fiction. What a concept.

I got Walter Mosley's The Man In My Basement and Octavia Butler's Fledgling. It is actually the smallest Black History Month book purchase I've ever made, and left me with a bag of money on the store credit, so I went berzerk. Devices and Dreams sort of called to me. It's a big, fat book science fiction book, first of The Engineer Trilogy by K.J. Parker, whom I've never heard of before. I don't even know if K.J. is male or female. I just read the back cover

When an engineer is sentenced to death for a petty transgression of Guild law, he flees the city, leaving behind his wife and daughter. Forced into exile, he seeks a terrible vengeance--one that will leave a trail of death and destruction in its wake. But he will not be able to achieve this by himself. He must draw up his plan using the blood of others...

This is the extraordinary tale of a man who engineers a war to be reunited with his family.

I think I can project myself into that character pretty easily.

I got Jumpers, a novelization of the upcoming movie by Steven Gould. It is the first movie novelization I ever bought. If it's a quarter as good as Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination it will be banging. If not, I've thrown away more expensive books.

I bought my third copy of Writer's Market in life...maybe I'll use it this time...and a couple of magazines. Spirituality and Health has a Find Your Stage Of Consciousness self-test. I can't wait...and I got National Geographic because the Black Pharoahs feature is a nice Black History Month gesture.