Book Cover Woes

A few days after my copy of Mary Renault's The Charioteer arrived in the mail, I glued the book shut.

Let me rewind.

Since its first publication in 1953, The Charioteer has had exactly one good cover: the very first. Fifty years of subpar covers have followed. As much as I would like to own a first edition, I don't have a spare hundred dollars lying around. Nor did I want to delay getting a copy in my grubby little mitts for good, free to mark up the pages and inhale the dust of the spine as I see fit without the censure of the library staff. So I pocketed my pride and bought one of the dismal reprints.

My time working at a craft store has left me with an assortment of odd skills, including Professional Gift Wrapping and Smiling Relentlessly On Christmas Eve. I've bound and covered a few journals by hand. It seemed simple enough to apply the same process to cover The Charioteer with a new paper jacket adhered directly on top of the old crummy one.

I missed a crucial step: putting wax paper between the cover and the rest of the pages, to prevent the book glue from slobbering everywhere. Whoops.

Forty minutes later, I finished separating the pages. No permanent damage was done, thankfully, even if the back half is a little more "feathery-looking" than when it arrived on my door. And the new cover paper came out quite sharp-looking against the original spine, which I left exposed for easy identification on my bookshelf.

But yes, for a little while there, I thought I had sealed my brand-new book forever.

I'm a hoarder when it comes to books; I like having physical copies in my hand and a stirring array of spines lined up end to end. The potential to "fix" bad covers has made me a lot less fussy when it comes to choosing editions of books now. As I type, my grungy mid-eighties technicolor version of The Princess Bride is being pressed with its new Florentine (!) paper cover. Who knows where I could go from here!

Another Aside: A Special Gift

I mentioned just how many times I have read Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor (five and counting!) since its release in April of last year. What I forgot to mention was that my lovely librarian friend, knowing my great affection for the book, picked up a signed copy for me at the ALA conference in San Francisco!

"For Kelly -- Serenity is a wish.  --Sarah"

According to my friend, Sarah Monette--the author behind the Katherine Addison pseudonym--was shy but charming, much like her main character. At her panel, she spoke for only a bit before reading one of the Winternight chapters, letting the book speak for itself.

Ahhh... I wish I could have been there. And not just so that I could compare my pronunciations of "Nazhmorhathveras" against the author's.

Thank you so much for the memento, Amanda!

An Aside: "Phantom" Search Terms

Dear unknown visitor who came here on the trail of the search terms "the phantom of the opera explained book grumps act 2":

1. I'm really touched you remembered Act 1. Honestly.
2. I'm sorry to disappoint. I do intend to give you your wish and finish my retelling... sometime. But I'd had other priorities for the past few months. But thank you for the reminder!

Merry Christmas! + "Dealing With Dragons"

Merry Christmas and a happy impending New Year, dear readers!

Working over the holidays has been a little bonkers, so none of the... three? reviews that I've been drafting are ready to appear before you. In their stead, let me fall back on one of my side projects: the read-alouds of fairy tales and short novels that I've been recording.

Back in July, I posted the first batch of short stories from fantasy greats authors Patricia C. Wrede, Patricia McKillip, and Peter S. Beagle. Now I've finished (yes, finished!) recording "Dealing With Dragons," a lighthearted story about a princess who volunteers to be kidnapped by a dragon, in order to keep away all the nonsense of knights, princes, and marriage. The dragon who takes her in doesn't need a princess so much as a librarian/cook/maid/co-conspirator.

It's an old favorite of mine and yours. I hope I do it justice.

This present is specifically for my friend Sarah, but the rest of you are welcome to listen, too!

From The Appendices: "The Phantom of the Opera" Explained (Part 1/2)

Not pictured: any mask actually worn
by the Phantom at any point

Earlier in January, I watched a recording of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera" with a friend who had no great love for the musical. She knew the songs, but didn't understand the story. Naturally, it was my responsibility to ruin redeem it for her.

If you don't know POTO, dear reader, this post from the appendices is for you. And if you do know it... I'm sorry for what I'm about to do to this great classic.

For the record: I have indeed read the original book by Gaston Leroux, which is less about misunderstood serial killers and more about French detectives and Persian expats.) I'll eventually do a book grump for the 1990 novel Phantom by Susan Kay. I've memorized the recording from the original Broadway cast, starring Sarah "Dating The Composer" Brightman and Michael "I Was Actually A Comedian Before This" Crawford. I've seen an off-Broadway performance in D.C., as well as the 2004 film starring Gerard Butler (a handsome albeit tone-deaf actor, perfectly suited to play the role of a hypnotically entrancing singer with a face like a partially decayed eggplant)

The specific performance which sparked this irreverent summary is the 2011 show recorded at the Royal Albert Hall. It's a beautiful performance that is remarkably well filmed, by the way, and I highly recommend watching it at the link.

Please note: the following summary is written purely from memory, and may be entirely inaccurate. Students writing papers on the book should not consider this a valid source of information, especially since it is not the book but the musical being discussed.

***

CLACK! goes the auctioneer's gavel, auctioning off various relics of the glory days of opera. Chief among them is a dusty old chandelier, which has some vague hints of a ghost story attached to it. Don't worry if you miss the details; we're about to get all of them. The fact that it is Lot Number 666 is entirely coincidental. Don't think about it too hard, because when the lights come on, it's time to do the time warp!

It's Paris, 1881, and we're about to enter the fabulous world of the opera house (because it's actually New York, 1986, and we are all about fabulous.) After one too many incidents, the owner of the Paris Opera House Opera Populaire is selling it off. From now on, the usual problems of showbiz (flouncing divas, dwindling attendance, dead bodies falling onto the stage) belong to Mssrs. Firmin and Andre.

(Wait, what was that last part?)

From The Appendices: "Jane Eyre" Explained

Welcome, dear reader, to the brand-new Appendices, where I will take the occasional break from book grumps to ramble less formally about this-and-that.

After I referenced the "mad wife in the attic" in my grump for The Thirteenth Tale, my friend made the mistake of asking me what Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was about, exactly.

Please note: the following summary is written purely from memory, and may be entirely inaccurate. Students writing papers on the book should not consider this a valid source of information.

***

This is actually from Jane Eyre.
 No other image for the rest of this post
will be, no matter how I label it.

So we have our heroine, Jane Eyre, who's an orphan. She lives off the so-called charity of her evil aunt (and uncle??) who likes to stand on beaming while her terrible children hit Jane and throw things at her and maybe burn her books. They do fun stuff like lock Jane in Rooms Where People Have Died and sic priests on her to tell her that she's an incurably wicked eight-year-old and is definitely gonna burn in hell, to which Jane has the awesome reply GUESS I'D BETTER NOT DIE THEN. Jane's afraid of pretty much nothing except for maybe ghosts.

Anyway. They hate her. It's terrible.

Eventually she gets sent to a convent or something where other incurably wicked girls learn to be productive members of society, and it's terrible there too, and she makes ONE FRIEND who then dies of tuberculosis or consumption or syphilis. (Probably not syphilis.) Along the way Jane grows up and learns to be a governess.

And who should be looking for a governess but the brooding, bad-tempered and swoonworthy-if-you're-into-that-sort-of-thing Mr. Rochester, whose first name I forget! He needs a governess for his little girl, who isn't actually his, but the bastard of the ballerina(??) he used to date. By another guy. Rochester just kind of shrugged and went with it because I guess the ballerina died. He needs someone (i.e. Jane) to keep the child out of his hair.

Very little of the story has to do with Mr. Rochester's not-child. A lot of it has to do with Rochester being a great big bully and Jane having none of it and Rochester going "whoa, are you actually sassing me, you tiny goblin woman?"