gosh I have a lot of books

From Carina Press:

• The Spurned Viscountess, by Shelley Munro. Gothic/historical romance. This one’s involving a woman who’s a healer and a psychic and who is roped into the obligatory marriage with the handsome viscount who only realizes after they’re married that hey, he really rather likes her. Also, there are the obligatory Mysterious Accidents! This should be fun.
• Presumed Dead, by Shirley Wells. Mystery. This one caught my eye mostly because the cover is striking, and I mean striking, what with the woman’s red dress standing out vividly against the black-and-white background. Was also intrigued by the plot blurb, involving the obligatory down-on-his-luck, disgraced cop who’s asked to privately investigate a disappearance.

And, moving into the print realm, I was amused as all get-out when someone at work left a big ol’ pile of romance novels on the island in the kitchen. Naturally, I scarfed several. These were the ones that looked interesting enough to scarf:

• The Stranger and I, by Carol Ericson. Harlequin Intrigue. Heroine witnesses a murder, obligatory Sekrit Agent Dude must protect her.
• Three titles out of what seems to be a Silhouette Nocturne series: Raintree: Sanctuary, by Beverly Barton; Raintree: Inferno, by Linda Howard; and Raintree: Haunted, by Linda Winstead Jones. These are paranormal romances, featuring what appear to be a clan of people with various paranormal gifts.
• And, another Harlequin Intrigue, Twin Targets by Jessica Andersen. Grabbed this one because I’ve actually already read several of her Intrigues as well as her fun ongoing Nightkeepers paranormal romance series. This is another “agent must protect beautiful woman who has the key to solving his case” type stories. Yes folks, I read a lot of those.

And last but most definitely not least, just because I’ve been meaning to get these anyway–in hardback, even, picked up from Third Place Books:

• Labyrinth, by katatomic (Kat Richardson). The fifth book in her Greywalker series.
• Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal. Gotten because everybody who’s anybody gushed over this book over the spring and summer, and because the whole concept of “if Jane Austen had written about a world that involves magic, what would that have been like?” sounds right up my alley.

This brings me up to 309 for the year! Soon to be purchased: the second Richard Castle novel as soon as it drops in ebook, the latest Tanya Huff Valor novel, and another of Doranna Durgin’s backlist as soon as that one shows up on the nook store.

Okay, this should be the last round of freebie ebooks from B&N, I think. They’re throwing out the big guns for this last drop!

• The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I, by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas (note: this version is abridged)
• The Iliad, by Homer
• The Odyssey, by Homer
• A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
• The Complete Sherlocks Holmes, Volume II, by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Man in the Iron Mask, by Alexandre Dumas
• Aesop’s Fables
• Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne
• Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens
• A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Cricket on the Hearth, by Charles Dickens

Additionally, I picked up Elizabeth Peter’s The Falcon at the Portal, since I’ll be reading that next after I’m done with A River in the Sky.

And, last but very certainly not least, in print, I picked up Ann Aguirre’s Killbox and seanan_mcguire‘s An Artificial Night! Once I’m done with the Great Amelia Peabody re-read, these ladies are coming up fast for my reading attention. Stay tuned.

This brings me to 290 books acquired for the year!

I’m not sure yet if this is the last round of B&N freebies; the promotion was supposed to run up through the 14th, so I’m thinking there’ll be at least one more round before they’re done. This one I’m particularly happy about though since it includes King Solomon’s Mines, a novel that’s specifically called out in the Amelia Peabody series by Amelia herself when she describes the adventures her family has. Woo!

Here they are. As you can see they’re all generally famous historical classics and I’m pleased that the Fairy Tales one is in there too.

• Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana
• Sailing Alone Around the World, by Joshua Slocum
• The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It, by Edith Nesbit
• King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard
• Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain
• The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Prince and the Pauper, by Mark Twain
• The Jungle Books, by Rudyard Kipling
• The Arabian Nights
• Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
• Fairy Tales, by Hans Christian Andersen

Meanwhile I have finally bailed on the hiatus! Friday evening, I went to meet solarbird, spazzkat, and jennygriffee for dinner after their day of PAX, and after, since Jenny and I had had a bit of plum wine, we decided to hang out in B&N until Jenny felt okay to drive. “Oh DARN,” we said to each other, “whatever shall we do in a bookstore?”

The answer for me was “buy the latest by mizkit and rachelcaine“! So I walked out with Truthseeker and Total Eclipse, respectively! Had a sharp eye out for seanan_mcguire‘s An Artificial Night, but didn’t see that yet.

Still holding off a bit on buying new ebooks, though. Wanting to make a bit more progress through the Amelias, up to at least The Falcon at the Portal. And probably up until the next paycheck anyway.

Total for the year: 275. It’ll be interesting to review these numbers and see how many of these books were freebies, how many were digital, and how many were print. Possibly also how many were both!

I came to the decision that since I’d violated my New Books Hiatus by buying that antho (although I still excuse myself for that on the grounds of Special Circumstances, and also, supporting jpsorrow), I am therefore delaying buying new books at least for a few more days even though the Hiatus is technically over!

So I’ll be going at least until my paycheck which should drop this weekend, or if I feel really virtuous, the next paycheck. 😉 I know a lot of fine, fine authors have had new titles come out lately, and I know that Good and Virtuous Readers Who Want to Support Fine Authors should buy them during their release weeks… but hey, folks, still trying to come out of rent shortage here. I’ll buy those books ASAP, I promise!

Besides, I’m still working through the Great Amelia Peabody Reread, and it’ll be a bit yet before I’ll be done with that. Just finished The Ape Who Guards the Balance, and will now be breaking out of publication order to jump to Guardian of the Horizon, which is actually the one that’s next chronologically. Then I’ll read the new one, A River in the Sky. Then it’ll be back to finishing out in publication order, picking up again with The Falcon at the Portal. Which, by the way, will probably be the next ebook I buy since my only copy of that right now is in hardback and I don’t want to haul that to and from work.

Meanwhile, I’m eying tasty new releases by mizkit, katatomic, seanan_mcguire, Mary Robinette Kowal, a couple of shiny new Carina Press releases, and a Diane Duane I saw get recommended over on tor.com. Lots of fun new stuff to read.

But it’s going to have to wait till I’m done with Amelia and Emerson!

I’ll leave y’all now with this latest drop of B&N freebies, and this week’s theme of freebies appears to be supernatural/SFnal, which is awesome:

• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne
• The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, by Jules Verne
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories, by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings, by Washington Irving
• The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri
• Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
• The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
• Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka
• Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction, by Joseph Conrad

Plus, two extra non-classics freebies: Hour of the Hunter by J.A. Jance, and Billy Boyle: A World War II Mystery, by James R. Benn. 261 total for the year!