In the past week, I have bought (or, more accurately, received — some of them were paid for weeks ago) nine books, all of which I want to write about in these pages. These are Language of the Night, by Ursula K. LeGuin; The Discarded Image, An Experiment in Criticism, and That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis; and the five volumes of the Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander. The Prydain books are replacements for copies that went missing in a house-move several years ago; the others I have not owned before, though I had previously read That Hideous Strength and several of the essays collected in Language of the Night. I have now read or re-read all of the books except the LeGuin, which only arrived this afternoon.

The other night I began a piece on An Experiment in Criticism, but it has grown much larger than I intended, and is desperately ill-focused, so I shall have to go back and prune it severely. That will probably be the first piece to appear.

In other news, Writing Down the Dragon is being held up, because I have developed a desperate fear of formatting errors. I still have never been able to figure out why The End of Earth and Sky displays on certain readers without any paragraph indents; the HTML is immaculate as far as I can tell. Wendy S. Delmater has suggested that I send out a cry for help. I can’t afford any of the reputable ebook formatting services.

So I am asking some of you, my 3.6 Loyal Readers*, to look over the rough ebook conversion and tell me before publication if it contains any visible formatting glitches. I will need to test the MOBI file on an e-ink Kindle, a Kindle Fire, and in the different Kindle apps for Android phones and tablets, iOS, PC, and Mac; some of these I can do myself, but I simply haven’t got access to all the different devices. If you are willing to test my formatting, please leave a comment to let me know. I regret that I can’t offer any payment for your trouble except a free copy of the ebook, but I shall certainly do that much.

Thanks in advance to all.

*Possibly even more than 3.6, in these latter days. Strange are the ways of Providence. I thank you all.