gosh I have a lot of books

The latest drop of free classics from B&N, plus one extra freebie I picked up from them for the heck of it:

• The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, by, well, Emily Dickinson!
• Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York, by Stephen Crane
• Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert
• The Life of Charlotte Bronte, by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Ethan Frome & Selected Stories, by Edith Wharton
• The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James
• Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
• Agnes Grey, by Anne Bronte
• The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser
• Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
• This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Shadow Bound, by Erin Kellison. Paranormal romance, as near as I can tell, featuring a banshee and a demon.

I must say that you know you’ve read a whole hell of a lot of urban fantasy when you see a title like The Beautiful and Damned, and you immediately think ‘vampires’.

I am as of this post on official No Buying New Books hiatus through the end of August. This includes buying replacement electronic copies of stuff I have previously owned in print.

Basically, there are two reasons for this. One is that my beloved solarbird and I will be a bit short on rent in the month of August, as we’re doing a shuffle of student tenants prior to the new school year. The other is that I do have nearly 600 things on the To Read shelf (both the physical one and the virtual one), so it ain’t like I’m lacking for things to read!

So from now until the tail end of August I will be trying to get caught up on many of these tasty, tasty things I’m behind on reading. This includes the new naominovik, katatomic‘s last before her next one drops, some blackaire, the two books of mizkit‘s I’m behind on, reading the three books I’ve got by my fellow Telgar Weyr alum Deby Fredericks, and a jaunt through my accumulated works by desperance. Time permitting, I will also be eying rachelcaine and jpsorrow!

Please however do feel free to use this post as a means to recommend to me forthcoming new books I should be getting as soon as the hiatus lifts! (And yes, I’m already intending to buy Kit’s Truthseeker as soon as I can! 😀 )

I got more ebooks. 😉 Though in this particular case, aside from the previously promised new Temeraire novel, all of these are actually replacing print books I’d previously owned. So there’s not much actual gain on the To Read shelves–and the hiatus of buying brand new books is still kind of on. Anyhow, here’s the rundown:

• In the Bleak Midwinter and A Fountain Filled With Blood, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. Mystery. Y’all may recall that I had previously acquired these as free PDFs, and I liked them well enough that I wanted to actually buy copies. So this is me officially adding them to my purchased library. I’ll swing back in a bit and get more of this series, since I want to know where it goes.
• The Smoke Thief and The Dream Thief, by Shana Abe. Historical/paranormal romance.
• Death is Forever, by Elizabeth Lowell. Romantic Suspense. One of the Lowells I like better than most.
• And last and very, very definitely not least, Tongues of Serpents, by Naomi Novik! Fantasy, sixth in the Temeraire series, and I’m thinking this is what I’m going to read next now that I’m done with Jim Hines!

Thus the year’s total comes up to 195.

Because I’ve picked up quite a few more books, like, y’know, I do.

Picked up in print:

• Idlewild, by Nick Sagan, which I got when Third Place was having a used books sale last weekend. SF.
• Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith. I follow her via the Outer Alliance, and was pleased to discover that she’s got some queer SF and thrillers; queer SF starring women is pretty thin on the ground, and I’m looking forward to reading her work.

And, picked up electronically:

• The rest of Jessica Andersen’s current series: Dawnkeepers, Skykeepers, and Demonkeepers. Buying Dawnkeepers for the first time although I’ve already read it in ARC form; the other two are new to my collection and I need to get caught up! Paranormal romance.
• Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald. SF. Was pleased to see his work finally showing up in electronic form on the B&N store, since most of his current stuff is available only in trade size and it’ll be easier to read on the go electronically.
• The Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry. I’m honestly not sure what genre this is supposed to be, but I’m thinking general fiction?
• Blood, Smoke and Mirrors by Robyn Bachar. Picked up because the ladies at Smart Bitches Trashy Books positively reviewed it. Paranormal romance.

Last but not least, bought in both print AND electronic:

• Pure Blood, by blackaire (Caitlin Kittredge). This is book 2 of her Nocturne City series, the next one I need to read–and I actually wound up buying it in both forms because I’d been bitching about it not being available for the Nook on the B&N forums, but had not gotten any movement on that for a while. So I caved and finally re-bought it in print. But then one of the forums admins finally notified me that they’d posted it at last with the rest of Kittredge’s work and he was very prompt about it, so I felt like I had to really buy it electronically on principle!

Which brings me all the way up to 180 books acquired for the year so far. Meanwhile I’m working on the last of my jimhines marathon since Red Hood’s Revenge is about to come out and I want that too–but I’m eying both desperance AND mizkit for my next marathons. I am open to argument as to who ought to go next. 😉

More books, all electronic!

• Brains: A Zombie Memoir, by Robin Becker. Because you all know how I love me some zombies, and I have in fact already read this one, since it’s a fast, quick read. This is another one that does the schtick of “point of view of a sentient zombie”, but this time, our zombie protagonist is a former English professor and a pompous ass to boot. And yet, it’s a strangely heartwarming tale of a zombie outbreak from the zombies’ point of view! My usual review post will be forthcoming.
• Night Life and Street Magic, both by blackaire (Caitlin Kittredge). Urban fantasy, the first books of both of her ongoing series. These are re-buys of books previously owned in print.
• The First Light Chronicles Omnibus, by Randolph Lalonde. SF. Another Barnes and Noble freebie.

And that makes 166! kisanthe thinks I need to stop a while and actually READ some of these books I’ve been acquiring. I told her my geekybrain was all CAN’T STOP YET NOOK IS NOT FULL!