I learnt as a teenager that 43 pence is the amount of money you leave London with, no matter how much you had when you arrived.
But I’ve spent it well today. Having had some unexpected extra spare time (see previous post) I did Waterstone’s on Trafalgar Square, and New Worlds on Charing Cross Road, and the new expanded Forbidden Planet on New Oxford Street. And I bought:
On by Adam Roberts; The Green Gene by Peter Dickinson; Maul, by Tricia Sullivan; Coalescent, by Stephen Baxter; Changing Planes, by Ursula Le Guin; The Gambler’s Fortune by Juliet McKenna; and a collection of Alternate History stories, Worlds That Weren’t. Also latest editions of Analog, Asimov’s, Locus, NY Review of SF, and Foundation.
I think I still have the price of dinner left. And 43 pence.
There are a few other books on the list that could be classified one way or another – is, for instance, Utopia really non-fiction rather than fiction? if fiction, does it really have any sfnal elements?
For The Book Thief, I felt that Death, the narrator, really was not an actor in the story, so I put it in the non-genre list, though with reservations!