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Books

In yesterday’s post I noted that I wouldn’t be getting “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” anytime soon. Well, yesterday my dad went out and bought it for my sister and me. Costco was selling the huge and popular book for $15 — half price! Kristen, who’s always been an extremely fast reader, has read between a third and a half of it already. By the time I get a chance to pick it up, she’ll be done with it.

Also yesterday, I got some Esperanto books that I ordered from ELNA, the Esperanto League for North America (serving, despite the name, only the United States). They’re technically a birthday gift because my dad decided to pick up the charge.

The books were packaged interestingly. They were placed inside a box that once held one of those garbage bag holders that you would hang on a wall. So they could put the postage, etc. on the box, they wrapped it in paper — specifically, a 10-year-old table of international postal rates. The books were contained inside a Safeway plastic bag, which was padded with a page from the New York Times and a Portuguese-language newspaper (!), both from April. Also included for more protection were little bits of paper that kind of fell out when I got everything else out.

As for the books themselves, there was a varied selection. But I noticed that only one of them was bound with an actual cardstock cover, like a paperback book. All the others had covers of slightly thicker paper. Also, only one or two of the five books had an ISBN. By the order in which I intend to read them, they are:

• “Gerda Malaperis!” by Claude Piron. This is the quintessential quasi-advanced Esperanto reader, starting in Chapter 1 with simple Esperanto and ending at an advanced level that I can pretty much read already. Published in Brazil by a Swiss author.
• “Ĝis Revido Krokodilido!” by Sten Johansson. A collection of short stories, some of which are about life in Esperantujo (Esperantoland, i.e., wherever Esperanto speakers are). Published in Sweden.
• “La Seĝo Dektria” by George E. Wagner. An original short story in booklet form. Published in the USA.
• “La Besto-farmo” by George Orwell. A translation of “Animal Farm,” which I’ve never read, by Gerald Tucker. I know it’s a short book, but it seems impossibly small in such a slim and tiny volume. It looks all the cooler that way, though. Published in Germany.
• “Tri Homoj en Boato” by Jerome K. Jerome. An old translation of “Three Men in a Boat,” which I’d never heard of. Will the late 1800s British humor translate well into 1934 Esperanto that can be understood by this 21st century reader? I don’t know, but I don’t think the binding of the comparatively large book, which appears to never have been read, will stand up to my reading if I’m a slow reader. That’s why this is last on the list. Published in Hungary.

Pouring out of my head yesterday were these thoughts:

I want to live somewhere scenic. I want to be able to go out into the mountains in the afternoon… or at least the foothills… maybe live in a little town abutting a National Forest. A place that only a few people know about, with a small general store and a gas station that’s part of a chain that you thought wasn’t around anymore. And I want to just as easily have a quaint but modern Northern city, with ancient two-story houses lining wide concrete roads, within reach. In the city I would see the skyscrapers old and new, the ancient buildings seeing another day on busy corners. Perhaps I could split my time between the town and the country.

I want it to snow there, without fail, every winter. To be able to stay inside with a good excuse and a mug of therapeutic hot chocolate would be nice. And then maybe I could go into town, chains on tires, and see the white-blanketed city, street sweepers running and Weather Channel camera crews on the sidewalk. Maybe pick up a newspaper and go into a coffee place. Read about what’s happening in our big city, and maybe a footnote about building a tunnel in the mountains where I live.

South Florida is hot and flat and built up. There’s nothing to do but live your life in the most boring fashion imaginable. It’s nothing but an ever-widening string of suburbs with no “urb” in sight, except for Fort Lauderdale, which I rarely visit, and Miami, which I never visit. Winter and summer are one and the same. It’s about a six-hour drive to the nearest hill.

A list of words ending in -onym. There are a lot.