Countdown: Leaving Today!

Well, frankly, I'm getting pretty excited.  We will be in London approximately in approximately 16.5 hours.  I've got my airplane books packed and ready to go.

North American cover

1. Dreamhunter, by Elizabeth Knox (published as The Rainbow Palace in the UK).  I finished this book just before I went to England for the first time with my parents, three years ago.  I read the sequel, Dreamquake, while in Britain and finished the book in a massive book-reading spree lasting seven hours (ending at 5:00 am), even though I should have been getting a good night's sleep ahead of a day of touring around London.  Brain-twisting book crack, that's what this series is.  (It's set an an alternate New Zealand in the early 20th century and follows a family of Dreamhunters, who can go into a mysterious desert realm called "The Place" and bring back dreams to broadcast and sell and the corrupt government who tries to "regulate" the industry and people's lives.)
2. Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters.  This is the only Sarah Waters book I haven't read yet and probably her most well-known.  It follows a pickpocket who is sent to pose a maid to a young woman as part of a plot to ruin her and steal her inheritance.  But things don't quite go as expected.  It apparently riffs off of Victorian sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, which I read last year and loved, so I'm really looking forward to this.  Waters' other novels - Tipping the Velvet (Victorian music hall-lesbian coming of age), Affinity (Victorian women's prison mixed spiritualism crossed with a mystery), The Night Watch (reverse chronology-women on the home front-World War II), and The Little Stranger (post-WWII country house ghost story with social criticism) - were all fantastic in different ways.
3. Rick Steves' Great Britain 2009, which I just stole from my parents this morning.  Steves is absolutely my favourite travel guide writer and I'm looking forward to poring over the maps and coming up with grand travel plans for the coming weeks, months, and years.

For the record, Tim's taking an omnibus edition of the first four Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, for his airplane reading.