Book!
I got a nice surprise in the post - well, I knew it was coming but I didn't know when so it was a surprise that it had arrived so early. I was lucky enough to win a book in LibraryThing's Early Reviewer's List for April and it was the one book I really wanted so that was even more lucky. It's called Snotty Saves The Day by Tod Davies, and one of the reasons I wanted it is that the blurb on LibraryThing opened with the sentence, "Snotty is a boy (or is he?)..." It appealed to me for some reason, I can't think why.
The package contained the book which is an awful lot thinner than I'd expected, along with a publicity postcard and a photocopy of an article from The Oregonian. The corner of the photocopy had a handwritten note which said, "Many was the time I spent in [my local] RR station! T". I was all "hee" until I looked at the address of the publishing company and realised they were actually based in Oregon. I'd initially thought the article was about the publishing company, Exterminating Angel Press, but when I read it, I realised that it was about the book and the author, Tod Davies. She had also set up the publishing company as well. So the owner of the 'T' at the end of the handwritten note was both author and publisher. When I looked at the note again I realised she'd indicated a paragraph of the article that said how Tod and her husband had lived in Liverpool for several years, so I presume that's how she got to be so familiar with a train station in the middle of nowhere in Lancashire! Pretty nifty. And nice that she left a little personal note for me.
And as if that wasn't enough, according to the article, Tod says, "All our books have something in common. It's just going to take a while for people to see it. They all question a dominant cultural story. We're not going to sit on the fence, we're going to stomp on it." She sounds like quite an interesting person, and that's certainly a policy I can get behind. I'd been really looking forward to reading the book anyway, but now I'm even more excited about it.
The package contained the book which is an awful lot thinner than I'd expected, along with a publicity postcard and a photocopy of an article from The Oregonian. The corner of the photocopy had a handwritten note which said, "Many was the time I spent in [my local] RR station! T". I was all "hee" until I looked at the address of the publishing company and realised they were actually based in Oregon. I'd initially thought the article was about the publishing company, Exterminating Angel Press, but when I read it, I realised that it was about the book and the author, Tod Davies. She had also set up the publishing company as well. So the owner of the 'T' at the end of the handwritten note was both author and publisher. When I looked at the note again I realised she'd indicated a paragraph of the article that said how Tod and her husband had lived in Liverpool for several years, so I presume that's how she got to be so familiar with a train station in the middle of nowhere in Lancashire! Pretty nifty. And nice that she left a little personal note for me.
And as if that wasn't enough, according to the article, Tod says, "All our books have something in common. It's just going to take a while for people to see it. They all question a dominant cultural story. We're not going to sit on the fence, we're going to stomp on it." She sounds like quite an interesting person, and that's certainly a policy I can get behind. I'd been really looking forward to reading the book anyway, but now I'm even more excited about it.