oops! I did it again[September 10, 2005] {the thread thus far}

So I just made yet another (déjà vu; yawn; all that) haul at the library. Small sources of random joy.

* Thanks to sufficient mention on Mount Helicon, I now have the task of reading Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (and I thought it had something to do with Sherlock Holmes in a post-modern way)

* You Can Do the Math ("overcome your math phobia and make better financial decisions") seemed interesting enough as a pick off the shelf (and there's hopefully more trivia about the multitude of named capitalist demons haunting us in the US of A)

* The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki has been on the list for a while, and it helped to have it sitting on the shelf (waiting for me)

* Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden moved up the list in order to furnish preparations for Dansh (looking forward to Kay Kay Menon) and Siskiyaan (after installing the see-through impact-proof wall before the TV screen to facilitate a release of anger and frustration while still keeping the TV alive for future viewings) [more on why]

* And finally on the language front we have The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher (a casual flipping of pages seems to make me wish I dropped acid), The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations ("the complete opinionated guide for the careful speaker") by Charles Harrington Elster (which boasts a note of praise from William Safire: ek-STROR-di-ner-ee), and The New Well-Tempered Sentence ("a punctuation handbook for the innocent, the eager, and the doomed") by Karen Elizabeth Gordon (a book that mixes wordy poetic discussions on matters of usage as far as the suite of punctuation is concerned along with panels detailing the adventures of the cover girl Loona, a duke and duchess, and two people called Rosie and Nimrod).