disaster relief book sale fundraiser

I'm going to take care of two problems here today:

1) I would like to raise funds for the American Red Cross in the wake of Hurricane Sandy,

2) I have way too many author copies around the house, that I'd like to get rid of.

So we're having a book sale here at Swan Tower. Comment on this post, or e-mail me at marie{dot}brennan{at}gmail{dot}com, and I will sell you the following books at the following prices, including autographs and (if you request it) personalization to you or another person of your choice.

Note that the prices are a bit higher than they might otherwise be, to ensure that packaging and shipping doesn't take too big a bite out of the Red Cross donation total. (I will send books overseas, too, but since this is for charity, I will probably ask you to kick in a few bucks extra to cover the increased cost of shipping.)

$10

• A Star Shall Fall, mass market paperback (17 copies, was 19)
  
• Warrior, mass market paperback (2 copies)
  
• Witch, mass market paperback (1 copy)
  

$15

• A Natural History of Dragons, unrevised Advance Bound Manuscript (1 copy)
  
• A Star Shall Fall, Advance Uncorrected Proof (1 copy)
  
• With Fate Conspire, Advance Uncorrected Proof (3 copies, was 4)
  
• Hexenkrieger (German translation of Witch) (1 copy)
  

$20

• In Ashes Lie, UK trade paperback (1 copy, was 2)
  
• A Star Shall Fall, trade paperback (1 copy)
  

$25

• A Star Shall Fall, Science Fiction Book Club hardcover (1 copy)
  
• With Fate Conspire, Science Fiction Book Club hardcover (3 copies)
  
• With Fate Conspire, regular hardcover (10 copies, was 12)
  
• Doppelgänger und Hexenkrieger (German omnibus of Warrior and Witch) (2 copies, was 4)
  

Please spread the word wherever you think people would be interested. I'll try to keep this list updated in a timely manner, so that you'll know how many books are left of each type. ETA: Total raised thus far = $245

The sale will run for one week (so, through next Thursday morning, the 8th of November).

The perils of bad translation

(I really ought to have a classics-related icon for posts like this. Any suggestions from the audience?)

There's a scene in Diana Wynne Jones' novel A Tale of Time City wherein Vivian, who is an ordinary girl from WWII England, is assigned to translate a text written in the "universal symbols" of Time City. She does an entertainingly bad job of it, and gets mocked by her tutor.

I probably wasn't supposed to take that as inspiration, was I?

See, years ago, when kurayami_hime and I were taking Latin in high school, we were given Catullus 3 to translate, along with a vocabulary list to look up before we began. The first word on that list was passer, which, according to my dictionary, meant "sparrow" (the poem being a mock-eulogy for his girlfriend's dead bird) . . . and also "flounder."

Inspired by this, and also by the number of our classmates who had mis-translated a line of Ovid's about "small things capture the minds of young girls" as "girls like to capture small animals" (they mistook anima for animal), kurayami_hime and I produced the following travesty, which our Latin teacher promptly stole, posted on the board, and only gave us photocopies of several years later; the original remains in her possession.

( My girl has killed her fish. )

Ahem.

And but so anyway, I read that to some people last night, and was told I should post it here for the entertainment of others. Thus I give it to you. My apologies to all the Latinists who are now bleeding from the eyeballs.