eating cucumbers without permission...

In my excessive reading of Harry Potter fanfiction, I’ve often been astounded to find, in the middle of stories, a note from the author complaining that “Hagrid’s accent is too annoying to write, so I’m not going to.” It’s astounding mostly because I’m perfectionist enough that I cannot understand releasing a half-finished story, not when something so glaringly obvious is still undone; but, as well as that, I’m astounded because Hagrid’s accent just isn’t very hard.

I was surprised this week to find myself reading two books about con men.

I’d pegged Lois McMaster Bujold’s “The Warrior’s Apprentice” as a kind of space-opera “Sword in the Stone”; and Terry Pratchett’s “Going Postal” promised to be a dull tract on mail delivery systems, or near enough¹. Thus my surprise — my happy surprise — when the books proved remarkably similar to each other, and remarkably different than what I’d expected.

1: The qualification “for a given value of ‘near’” would seem apt in context.