Amazing invisible bookshelf

I walked into my room today and saw a stack of books floating in the air with no visible means of support.

The magic spell to make books float is "Boccaccio!" ^*

No lah, it's actually the Umbra Conceal bookshelf. The horizontal part goes inside the back cover of the bottom book, and you can see here that there are two small lips that hold the edge of the cover up (which is why the bottom book has to be a hardback).

It cost ten dollars on sale and was very easy to install, two screws only. I had to drill three pilot holes at the same latitude before I found a stud (wooden upright beam) though...it turned out that the slight ridge in the wall which I thought signified a stud, was probably a seam between two sheets of drywall.

Seriously, when I was younger I thought Americans were very strong because I would read in novels of a character punching a hole in a wall. Then I went on a Habitat for Humanity trip and discovered that American house walls are essentially made of half an inch of chalk between two sheets of thick paper.

I bought The Ruby Dice because I was on a Catherine Asaro kick. Another female SF author I'm trying out is Karen Traviss, second from the top. I've read a Star Wars novel by her which is about 40 years ABY (After the Battle of Yavin) and am really confused. The last thing in the Star Wars universe I've read was I, Jedi, which is only 11 ABY. Aside from my being out-of-date, Bloodlines is so-so. I'll have to see if Traviss is better with her own universes and characters.

George Lucas actually has a guy whose full-time job is managing continuity between the huge number of Star Wars films, novels, cartoons, computer games, online universes, etc. Therefore everything that's published with "Star Wars" on it is canon, unlike some other universes like Star Trek.

By the way, the Wookiepedia article on I, Jedi says Stackpole retconned some of the events in Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy Trilogy. Good, I hate Anderson. He's a hack. I once tried reading StarCraft novels and there was one by a Gabriel Mesta that was really awful...I had to struggle to finish it. I only found out after finishing the book that it was a pseudonym of Anderson's.

Also, have been reading way, WAY too much Lovecraft. I'll have to track down Neil Gaiman's parodies later. But, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a masterpiece as a dream-epic. Just that one novella rivals the breadth of Gaiman's The Sandman series. It's true what Lovecraft wrote in The Silver Key though. At least for me...I've stopped dreaming as much as I've gotten older. Life swamps you.

* Actually "boccaccio" is something that Richard Merrill, alias Mairelon the Magician, mutters while searching for the latch to a secret passage behind a book-case in someone's country house. His hireling - and later, protegee - Kim, being a street child and not classically educated, develops the impression that it's a spell that opens a magic door.