Dichroic Reflections

new books, syndicated

Yes, I have pre-ordered my copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (If you care about it at all you've probably already heard it will be released July 16, 2005.)

E. Nesbit's Harding's Luck is up online now. It's one of the hardest to find of Nesbit's books (that I know of), a companion book to House of Arden but - well, here's the review I wrote at Amazon a few years ago:

Many of Edith Nesbit's books are not so much novels as they are sequences of shorter stories (perhaps they were published, or meant to be read, serially?) Harding's Luck and its companion, The House of Arden, have far more complex and interwoven plots. The events in the lighter House of Arden form only a part Harding's Luck, as Dickie is a much fuller character than Edred and Elfrida. They must have been plotted together, as each contains references to the other. As in The Psammead and the Carpet, there are numerous instances of Nesbit's socialist views (not in the modern sense of big government, more along the lines of GK Chesterton's definition "A socialist is a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney sweeps paid for it."). Children will never notice these; adults may find them sweet but sadly naive.

In their richness of plot and character, and in the sense of something deeper and truer lurking behind the superficial magic, these two are probably the crown of Nesbit's work. Givn the fact that the paperback copy of Harding's Luck costs $10, it's worthwhile to shell out another $7 for the hardback, so you'll have it longer.

I bought my copy at Amazon when it was reprinted (I'd never heard of the book before I came across it there, but House of Arden had been my favorite of hers, so there was squee'ing and possibly sme jumping up and down) but that must have been a very small print run. The online version is the next best thing and even contains the original illustrations by H.R. Millar.

Speaking of books online, I've been experimenting with Livejournal syndication. The Online Books Page has a new RSS feed for its New Listings page, so I've created a syndicated LJ account for it, online_books, that can be added to your Friends page like any other LJ. One warning: on the RSS feed, each new book is listed as an individual entry, rather than having one entry per day, so the feed can eat up a Friends page. I've also syndicated this page; you can find it at Dichroic2. However, that's not nearly as helpful because the LJ page just contains the first few lines of each entry. It might be useful for someone who spends a lot of time in LJ, to see when I've updated, but since I do that most weekdays anyway, it's not a lot of help.

Posted by dichroic at December 21, 2004 12:46 PM