Umm, too many books?

How many books bought is one day is too many? Is this too many?

How about this?

How about both of these piles put together? :-)

These are the books I picked up on my day out in Hay-on-Wye, a lovely village on the border between England and Wales, famous for its bookshops. Yes, it's a village full of bookshops! And I got to spend a day there on my own this year, which was fantastic. Well, it was fantastic until my backpack became ridiculously heavy and browsing - squatting and standing up with a huge load on my back - became more like excercise and less like fun. But hey, by then I had over 30 books added to my collection so I suppose it was time to go anyway. :-)

Here they are in list format, in case anyone wants to advise me on which ones to read next - I've already read Dating Big Bird by Laura Zigman (very funny!) and I'm currently reading The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley - I couldn't resist Flavia any longer. What should be next though?

Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman
Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani
The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones
Cuban Heels by Emily Barr
Dating Big Bird by Laura Zigman
The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
Empress Orchid by Anchee Min
Enna Burning by Shannon Hale
Feed by M.T. Anderson
Five on a Treasure Island by Enid Blyton
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
Hector and the Secrets of Love by Francois Lelord
Holes by Louis Sachar
Ireland by Frank Delaney
The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins
Lost Souls by Michael Collins
The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli
The Marriage Bureau for Rich People by Farahad Zama
A Morbid Taste for Bones (Cadfael Chronicles 1) by Ellis Peters
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
Private Life by Jane Smiley
Queen Mum by Kate Long
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
Suchi for Beginners by Marian Keyes
Things to Make and Mend by Ruth Thomas
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley
Why not Catch-21? by Andrew Dexter
The Witching Hour by Anne Rice

New books and Secret Santa

I can't believe we're working our way through November already and that it's almost time for Christmas again. And that means almost time for the baby to finally be here too... time is definitely flying!

And since it's almost time for Christmas, the book blogging community is getting ready as well - it's time to sign up for the Book Blogger Holiday Swap. Sign up before November 12 and you'll be sent the name of the blogger to whom you need to send a holiday gift. What fun!

And speaking of presents, I needed to kill some time in town this week and ended up at a bookstore of course. Here's what I got:

• The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Gone by Michael Grant
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• Nation by Terry Pratchett

Which one do you think I should start with? :-)

New Books and the Proximidade Award

Since I tend to buy books second hand or on sale, I often miss out on new releases. In fact, at the end of last year I realised that I hadn't read a single book published in 2008! I decided to rectify this and joined the Countdown Challenge and the Pub Challenge in order to have some goals. And here we are in April and I am still very, very behind. So what did I do on my lunch break today> I visited Waterstone's and bought three books, two of which were published in 2008. The 2009 ones are still either only hardcover and/or too expensive so I'll wait a few months. Here's what I got:

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson

So, which one should I read first? :-)

_________

Trish presented me with the Proximidade Award:

"This blog invests and believes in the PROXIMITY-nearness in space, time and relationships. These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement! Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this clever-written text into the body of their award."

Thanks Trish, I am really touched!

I pass this lovely award on to:

Lezlie from Books 'n Border Collies
Nymeth from Things Mean A Lot
Kailana from The Written World
raidergirl3 from An Adventure in Reading
Joy from Thoughts of Joy
Iliana from Bookgirl's Nightstand

And if I could give it back to Trish too, I would, but that would be just plain silly!

It's a wonderful feeling to have friends like you out there in the world.

What I bought...

Most of our luggage coming back from the US was books... shocking, eh? Not only did I book or two in every historical place we visited, regular bookstores also called my name. My favorite (besides the giant Borders) was a small secondhand one in Salem - a photo is included in this post. Aside from these, we happened upon a book sale - all books for a dollar. How could I possibly resist? Thankfully we didn't have much cash left or the damage would have been worse.

Here's what I got:

The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot
Dune by Frank Herbert
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Alan Gurganus
The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
One for the Money by Janet Evanovich
The Fifth of March by Ann Rinaldi
A Break with Charity by Ann Rinaldi
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
Wifey by Judy Blume
Ill Wind by Rachel Caine
Turtle Moon by Alice Hoffman
The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Don't Know Much about the Civil War by Kenneth C. Davis
A Guide to the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692 by David C. Brown
Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
Native American Songs and Poems , ed by Brian Swann
Woman in the Nineteenth Century by Margaret Fuller
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Plain Janes by Cecil Castelucci and Jim Rugg
Walden; or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson
The Long Way Home by Joss Whedon and Georges Jeanty
No Future for You by Joss Whedon, Brian K. Vaughan and Georges Jeanty
Angel - After the Fall by Joss Whedon and Brian Lynch

And if you look at one of the photos, the box sitting on top of the books is a Book Hug for Book Lovers. It's just a stand so that you can read while eating or whatever, but what a cool name! Marketing makes shopping in the US such a pleasure, all the creative names for things!

So what do you think I should read first?

Read-A-Thon and book shopping

I decided to the Read-A-Thon after all... You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging/commenting as much as I used to... I've had a lot going on in my life, not all positive, and things have been kind of heavy. So whereas a month ago I wasn't sure I wanted to read for so long, now the idea of spending my whole Saturday and a part of Sunday REALLY appeals to me. Really. I just want to curl up and read and have no one disturb me for days. Can we make the read-a-thon last longer?

So while I was thinking about what books to line up for Saturday, I decided that I needed more choice so I just went to the secondhand bookstore I try to stay away from. I ended up with a whole bag of books. Here's what I got - have you read any of them and do you think they'd be good for a read-a-thon?

Bad Heir Day by Wendy Holden
March by Geraldine Brooks
Brown Owl's Guide to Life by Kate Harrison
The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
I am David by Anne Holm
Night by Elie Wiesel
Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
Getting Rid of Matthew by Jane Fallon
Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is a Four-Letter Word by Claire Calman
Ya-Yas in Bloom by Rebecca Wells
Intuition by Peter Jinks
The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper
The Norse Myths by Kevin Crossley-Holland
Runemarks by Joanne Harris

New Books!

I went to the used book store today - and went overboard again:

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson
Winter Rose by Patricia McKillip
The Rise and Fall of the Yummy Mummy by Polly Williams
The Abortionist's Daughter by Elisabeth Hyde
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
Welcome to the World, Baby Girl by Fannie Flagg
Unless by Carol Shields

So - have you read any of these? Which one(s) should I read first? :-)

More books arrived

Amazon is having a clearance sale so I of course got a few things. Well, actually I get a few things each month. Anyway, here's what arrived today:

Pagan's Crusade by Catherine Jinks
How I Paid for College by Marc Acito
The Giver by Lois Lowry

And two films: Mars Attacks and Corpse Bride

I've also been to the library recently and got:

The Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
Jennifer Government by Max Barry
The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen
This is Your Life by John O'Farrell
Charmed and Dangerous by Candace Havens

Have you read any of these? What did you think?

Also, I'm looking for my next audio book and would love some recommendations!

Undead and Unwed - in Paris!

I finished reading MaryJanice Davidson's Undead and Unwed - the first book in the Queen Betsy series - while in Paris for the weekend. The book was excellent - what fun! The back cover describes it as 'what would happen if Carrie Bradshaw ever met a vampire' but it also bring back Buffy to me. I love Buffy, largely thanks to the brilliant Joss Whedon script. The dialogue in Undead and Unwed was really quick and witty and the story moved along well. And it was that silly-kind-of-funny that really makes me laugh - with puns galore.

The story is about a girl named Betsy who is killed and turned into a vampire - but she doesn't want to live in the shadows and participate in vamp politics or anything like that. She doesn't see why she can't just continue her life, even if she is dead. Umm, undead. She wants to hang out with her friends, go shopping for shoes and visit her Mom - not fight other vampires. But she has to come to terms with some new experiences - like learning to hunt for dinner and not being able to eat real food. And it doesn't help that the other vampires she encounters seem to think that she's the foretold Queen and won't leave her in peace.

I'm giving it 4 stars - not because it's a masterpiece of literature but because I had so much fun reading this book, I had to convince myself not to go out and buy the next one in the series right away!

And while in Paris... well, I came back with a bag full of books. As it happened, the hotel that Joe booked for us in our favorite St Germain disctrict was two steps away from what is apparently the biggest second hand English-language bookstore in continental Europe; San Francisco Books, I think it was called. How's that for meant-to-be? Around the corner was the second-biggest one. And two doors down from the pub where Joe was watching the rugby in the afternoon was a lovely quaint book shop, where I spent about an hour. And while we were deciding what to do on Sunday we happened upon, totally accidendally, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, which I'd read about on Sassymonkey Reads just a few weeks back. Sassymonkey posted more on the history of this bookshop over at BlogHer.

I hope that all this allows you to understand the long list of books we came back with:

1. Paris - A Secret History by Andrew Hussey
2. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
3. Perfume by Patrick Suskind
4. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
5. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
6. Watership Down by Richard Adams
7. The Thomas Covenant Trilogy by Stephen Donaldson
8. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
9. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
10. The Gathering by Anne Enright
11. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
12. A Hundered Secret Senses by Amy Tan
13. The Witch of Portobello by Paolo Coelho
14. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

The non-reading related parts of our trip to Paris were also great - I'm really developing an appreciation of France, I'd like to see more of it. Maybe Bretagne will be next! :-)

Undead and Unwed also reviewed by:
Kristi at Passion for the Page

I am not a sane person.

Yep. I went to the bookstore again. The used bookstore, so it didn't cost me very much, but still! And when I go I tend to get everything I want, I have no self-restraint. I'm blogging about it so that I can keep track of my habit. Oh it makes me so happy, here's what I got this time:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Summer Sisters by Judy Blume
A Model World and Other Stories by Michael Chabon
Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore
Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella
The House at Riverton by Kate Morton
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
I Don't Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson
One True Thing by Anna Quindlen
The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks
Heaven and Earth by Nora Roberts
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar
Affinity by Sarah Waters

Pretty good for a small second-hand book store in Brussels!

More books!

I needed some cheering up so I went to a secondhand bookstore at lunch time and... well, let's just say that I have no will power. Here's what I got - guess how many are on my reading list for this year. Ummm...none.

1. Dancer by Colum McCann
2. The Last of the Irish Males by Joseph O'Connor
3. Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui
4. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
5. The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
6. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (finished 24/02/08)
7. The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
8. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
9. The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman by Sue Townsend
10. Sorceress by Celia Rees (now I have to buy Witch Child soon...)
11. A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly
12. The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud by Ben Sherwood
13. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
14. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
15. Folktales of the North American Indian
16. Cajun Tales of the Louisiana Bayous by Ray Robinson