If you haven’t got it from the title, this isn’t a review. The subject of the rest of this post is to explain exactly why this isn’t a review, or more accurately, why this could have been a review but isn’t.

First, do you recall this scene from [enter your favorite soap opera here]? One of the charac­ters receives a parcel or a letter from the mailman. She signs for it with no haste whatso­ever, engages in some not-so-witty banter with the mailman and finally holds the letter (let’s just assume it’s a letter) in her hand.

No, she does not open it.

Instead, she thinks aloud, “Who could this be from? Hmmm…I wonder — could it be from my dear old aunt? Or my dear old nephew who lives in a distant country and never writes? …” She continues in this vein until you scream at her, “Dammit woman! Open the letter!!” (Well, actually that doesn’t have any effect on her because she can’t hear you, and she continues long after you’ve lost your cool.)

Funny, eh? Well, forget about it because it’s not really relevant to what I was trying to say.

Anyway, after having spent the whole weekend waiting in antic­i­pa­tion to pick up my copy of Towers of Midnight on Monday, when I finally went over to the mail-room to pick it up, it wasn’t there. After some inves­ti­ga­tion, it turns out that the package I had collected from the mail-room on Friday and had never bothered to open (under the assump­tion that it was a bunch of ink cartridges for my printer), was, in fact, the Towers of Midnight, deliv­ered one business day earlier than I had expected.

So there it was, sitting in my living room for two long days, while I waited for Monday to arrive.

Oh, and by the way, it turns out I never ordered the ink cartridges.