Apparently

if Taco Bell leaves off part of your order, they have a book they write your name and the item down in, and then you can come back at your leisure and pick it up. It's not ideal, I suppose, but it's keeping me from answering the survey about how I had to repeat my order twice, make sure they gave me diet instead of sugared soda, and I had to ask for a straw. Still, I'm relatively happy with my meal, if not the service. I'll stop by when I go out to have my hair cut or such today.

I got my package picked up. For two books, it's fairly large; the Pippi collection is about 8" x 10" x 1" in terms of dimensions. It was nice to get something from Amazon, as I haven't ordered anything in about a month or so. The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking includes Pippi Longstocking, Pippi Goes on Board, and Pippi in the South Seas, all of which I loved as a child. {Not so, YKWIA, who I think grumbled about a wretched child when I mentioned it.) I'm curious as to whether I will enjoy them as much as an adult. I still have Gary Corby's The Ionian Sanction to read before Sacred Games, but I really liked The Pericles Commission, with its mix of history and humour. I also love the colours and illustrations of the American hardcover dust jackets, so much that having read the first book on the Kindle, I bought the book again in hardback for the cover. The first book's jacket background was a brilliant blue, the second a kind of terracotta. This one is yellow, with Greek redware-style wrestlers, the sacred flame of the ancient Olympic games, with Nicolaos and Diotima peeking in. I approve of the fact that, true to art form and nature, there is no attempt to pretend the naked wrestlers are, well, not naked, even though it's on a book cover. (Okay, like most penises of Greek art, it's tiny, so most people who would be easily shocked, probably couldn't tell, but here in the States, people get bent out of shape for the silliest things, like whether a Greek wrestler, who should be naked, is.) :)

PS Ooh, I just put the books together and it turns out they're not the same size. :( Looks like the imprint at least changed. Oh, well, it's not the end of the world, but I really do prefer series books to be uniform. This is why I bought Dead Ever After, the final Sookie Stackhouse book by Charlaine Harris, from the Science Fiction Book Club, because I'd gotten the others through there and their editions were smaller than the general market ones. Sigh. I know, what's important is what's inside the cover, and I'm being a little OCD. But for those publishers out there, consider that readers have such strange quirks. In the meantime, I've added the books to my to-read pile (which is growing quickly). Maybe before I tackle the house I'll actually do a bit of reading.