First Amazon packaging follow-up

The eleven book order has been broken up into two shipments which could be bad: more opportunity for bad packaging to allow for damaged books. On the other hand, a quarter fewer third books in the box means that many fewer to pummel the others. They did add another book from a previous order to bigger box, so tomorrow two shipments should arrive: one with three books and one with nine.

The question is how many will be damaged and sent back....

Yesterday I received a single trade paperback (NYRB's collection The Stories of J.F. Powers) in the ridiculous padded envelope through UPS method. This time I was lucky and the book was fine. This does happen but it's a roulette system and close to half the time I either have to send the books back or shelve a damaged item. This is how I measure my blood pressure these days.

I'm reading Conor Fitzgerald's first book, The Dogs of Rome, the third sequel of which will arrive tomorrow. I'm liking it a lot. It's one of those books that doesn't do anything spectacularly except keep you turning pages, which, bottom line, is really a good thing when reading any book, not just genre fiction. Fitzgerald is an Irishman living in Italy, and the past few years I've become a big fan of Irish crime fiction.

Other than the Stieg Larsson Millenium trilogy, I've completely missed out on the Scandinavian crime wave but I have been steeped fairly heavily in the Irish one. Okay, it may not be a wave but it should be. For those people who think private eye writing is dead, read the Ed Loy books by Declan Hughes and see where the ghost of Chandler went.

But back to the subject of the post, Amazon used FedEx so we'll see what happens....