Of seals and dragons and dragon seals

Armor of Light and 3K are being even less rivetting than usual. Or maybe that's yesterday's heat and teeth-grit near-migraine talking. 3K is at the battle of Red Cliff and I, frankly, am not impressed by anyone's behaviour there. Even ascribing most of it to authorial bias, Zhou Yu's 'look he's gonna win the battle for us kill him now' attitude stretches my belief oh, just a tad.

But Karin 1 was sitting by my bedside and I read a few pages of that instead until compelled, by the sudden appearance of the Dragon King of the Eastern Ocean, to go look up his name hanzi. The manga has them furigana'd in as close to Chinese as katakana can get and I was wondering how close that was.
( Cut for blameless pastimes )

And speaking of dragons...

Novik's website says Victory of Eagles paperback will be out July the something. Err uh hunh?

Book City doesn't have it but BC doesn't have much. So off I pedal to Bakka and look for VoE, which should be displayed everywhere if out. No displays. Ask the clerk. 'It'll be out in June." 'Anh, but, someone said it's out the 19th...' 'We don't have a definite date but we'll be getting it in June. You can pre-order it and I'll give you a call.' 'Ah no thanks, I'll come back.'

Odd. I could swear Shay bought it. So off I pedal to the World's Biggest Bookstore. Which has Victory of Eagles, that isn't available to the independents until next month. I have no idea what this is all about, but I fancy someone's getting shafted somewhere along the line.