Going mental

Terry Pratchett's latest, Going Postal, was published recently. Thursday 7th October actually, although as much as three weeks ago I was being made jealous by the fact that Aquarion had found a copy in Waterstones. Grr. Where's my copy?

I generally like to read the latest Discworld book as soon as I possibly can, and this is why I don't pre-order them from Amazon.co.uk — they'll only ship it to you on the official day of release, add a couple of days for delivery (and since it was published on a Thursday I'd most likely only have received it the following Monday), and in the meantime you've wandered past dozens of copies in all the many many bookshops that sell it early (ie. almost all of them), thus causing mental anguish and frustration that is guaranteed to make Cathy Not A Happy Bunny. (Gosh, that was a long sentence. I profusely apologise for my lack of grammatical structure.)

So, Cathy waits. And waits. And in the meantime, a few hundred messages eagerly (one assumes) discussing Going Postal turn up on alt.fan.pratchett which she cannot read and has to mark to be read Later, as well as instructing her newsreader not to throw them away because they're more than five days old. (As a further consequence of which, I now have all the messages on AFP for the last three weeks, and haven't been able to see the threading of discussions for about that long because threaded messages go rightwards. And offscreen.)

Still, I thought. There's a university bookshop on campus, and also a Tesco fifteen minutes' walk away. Even if neither one sells the book before publishing, they'll certainly be selling it then. After all, I am told that the supermarkets Down South where I used to live have been selling the book since about a week prior to the release date, so no worries there.

I have no idea if the local Tesco has managed to find copies as yet; certainly they hadn't by the Saturday after publication. The on-campus bookshop, having only bothered to order the book the day after it was published, only started selling it three days ago. This is when I got my copy.

But I didn't buy it from them. Instead, I have a copy of Going Postal that's travelled 150 miles from Chelmsford, Essex to Up Here, courtesy of loving boyfriend. And since I barely read it while Kevin was here at the weekend, I'm only on page 158.

If you'll excuse me, I'd like to read for a while.