a little bit different.

The hubby didn’t get the job. 😦 A employee who was already trained and with the company (has been for 28 years apparently) put in for a transfer, so of course, that guy got the job. We’re bummed, but still optimistic. Just means there is something else even better out there!

But, since I was feeling a smidge bummed, I thought it called for a little retail therapy. And, as most bibliophiles know, retail therapy really means book shopping! I hit Barnes & Noble today, list in hand, and came out with nothing on it! LOL I’ve been feeling the desire to read something a little different lately. All this Sherlock Holmes, Wilkie Collins, and Don Quixote were leading me (more like PUSHED) over to the Young Adult aisle.  So I willingly went!  Our B&N’s YA section is abismally tiny, but there was still a bit to choose from. 

(As an aside, I am SO upset that the new editions of New Moon by Stephenie Meyer have an excerpt from Eclipse in them.  I am so NOT going to buy a new edition to read it, but I really want to read it.  If I hadn’t been on my lunch hour I would have plopped my big ole preggers butt down in a chair and read it.  Alas, I didn’t have time!  Damn! End aside.)

So, I picked up:

Sarah Dessen’s The Truth About Forever. I’ve been meaning to read one of her books for ages upon ages! So I finally bought one. This one looks gooooood.  And I thnk it’s one I’ll identify with; it’s about a girl who, among other things, is grieving for her father.

The Summer King by OR Melling book 2 in The Chronicles of Faerie.  Which is odd, because it’s the second in a series and I don’t have the first one.  But they didn’t have it, it’s a series I really want to read, so I’m going to order number 1.  They had number 3 too, but it was hardback.  Going to wait for that one.

The Naming by Alison Croggon. I’d never heard of this, but reading the back, it sounded really good.  And it’s the first in a series.  Thought I’d give it a try.

And I also got Colleen Gleason’s The Rest Falls Away.  It sounds so good with all it’s talk of vampires and such.  With the next one in the series coming out soon, I figured it was time to catch up!

PS: Can you tell wordpress added color capabilities?  Woot!!

So, yes, in case you couldn’t tell, I hit up a book sale yesterday.  Every year (this is it’s 49th year!) this local church has a huge (I’m talking 50,000+ books huge!) sale.  It lasts 3 days.  Yesterday was the first day.   They have cookbooks, gardening books, paperbacks, hardbacks, fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, albums, hobby books, craft books, foreign language…well, you get the idea.  I hit the 4 tables slam-packed full of nearly new hardback fiction.  As you’ll see below, I hit treasure!  I’m thinking of going back today, as they books are cheaper.  And maybe Friday because, if I remember correctly, it’s everything you can get in a bag for like $5. 

I’m having picture difficulties at the mo’, so as soon as I can get it up here, I will!  In the meantime, here is what I got, all hardback, all in excellent condition!  Yes, I just can’t get over that!

A Parchment of Leaves by Silas House – Haven’t read House before, even though I also have his book Clay’s Quilt.  It’s set during WWI and features a Cherokee woman.  Since I have a little Cherokee blood, the character appeals to me. 

The Affair of the Poisons by Anne Somerset – Nonfiction about “Madame de Brinvilliers, who shocked all of France with the heinous murders of her father and brothers.  Furious that the family disapproved of her taking a lover, she and her scurrilous paramour poisoned them out of a desire for revenge and greed for her anticipated inheritance. The ensuing scandal, skillfully recounted by noted British historian Somerset (Elizabeth I), inflamed the nation’s fears that the decadent nobles at the Sun King’s court were caught up in a clandestine world of sex, witchcraft and murder. Every untimely death and peculiar illness, including Louis XIV’s chronic vapors, suddenly appeared to be the nefarious work of an unwholesome network of princesses, dukes and fortunetellers. As panic ballooned, even the king’s mistress, Mme de Montespan, fell under suspicion (and was eventually banished from the king’s bed), and many of France’s most distinguished personages were sent to trial, jail and, in several cases, the scaffold. Somerset reconstructs this macabre history from surviving public documents, enlivened with contemporary gossip and wit from letters between the French elite. Her arch prose sometimes stalls amid the intricacies of myriad minor characters’ histories, but overall, she offers an intelligent review of a darkly fascinating affair. From Publishers Weekly.”  How could I not pick that up?

Freddy & Fredericka by Mark Helprin – This book didn’t look read.  It even creaked when opened.  Poor book!   I had to bring it home!  It’s called a “brilliantly refashioned fairy tale and a magnificently funny farce” and that sounds good to me!

Aloft by Chang-rae Lee – it has such a pretty cover.  I’m a sucker for a pretty cover.  The story sounsd good too. 

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl – Nonfiction.  I already have 2 of her books and was tickled to find this third one.  Now I just need to read them!  Reichl was a food critic for the New York Times. 

Zorro by Isabel Allende – I’ve wanted to read this since it came out.  I love retellings of old legends and Zorro is one of my favorites.  And I just know I’ll be picturing Antonio Banderas while reading it – always a good thing!

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson – Another one that looked practically brand new.  Now I have to get my hands on the first one, Case Histories.  I’ve been curious about both, especially after Case Histories got such buzz. 

Shalamar the Clown by Salman Rushdie – I loved Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (It’s in my all-time top 10) and have been meaning to read more by him. 

The Terror by Dan Simmons – Another that looked practically unread.  I think this will be my beach read this year.  It sounds like a page-turner.

The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke – Can you believe as much as I love Funke, I haven’t read this one?  I kept meaning to get it, but obviously I was meant to have this one. 

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horowitz – Another for the beach. Nonfiction.  Captain Cook is considered to be one of the most important navigators in history, but little is known about him.  Horowitz sets out to find out more about the man in this travel narrative/biography.

The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay – Had never heard of it, but the book description intrigued me, since it’s described as a literary thriller.

My Lady Scandalous: The Amazing Life and Outrageous Times of Grace Dalrymple Elliott, Royal Courtesan by Jo Manning – Nonfiction, another one I hadn’t heard of but the description interested me, especially since it’s a true story.  A wicked turnabout on Jane Austen’s oft-quoted adage — “a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” — is My Lady Scandalous, a richly raucous history that traverses the notoriously licentious British Regency era in the company of its most celebrated courtesan.

So there you have it.  I definitely think I’ll have to go back today.  As long as it isn’t raining.

So, just what did I get with that $100 gift certificate? Quite a bit actually. And I did spend a little of my own money. So, technically, I got all the following for about $40.

• Vampire Diaries #1: The Awakening by LJ Smith
• The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
• Armadale by Wilkie Collins
• Kristin Lavransdatter (all three in one volume) by Sigrid Undset
• No Name by Wilkie Collins
• The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes Volume I by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes Volume II by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Burning Time by Ruth Morgan
• Fables: Wolves by Bill Willingham
• Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas
• The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
• Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald

You will notice quite a few classics on this list. I’m hoping to read more classics this year. The few I read this year proved to me that I can, in fact, read a classic and, ALAS, enjoy it too! I have been dying to read more of Wilkie Collins work and am holding off bravely on starting The Moonstone until January for the classics challenge. I also hope to pull of Armadale and No Namein 2007 too. And A Rogue’s Life, which I recently picked up at B&N. I have been wanting to read more of Conan Doyle, as I enjoyed The Hound of the Baskervilles in high school but haven’t really read any since. And, being the anal reader than I am, I want to read it in order, hence the Volumes I and II of the complete tales.

I read The Three Musketeers earlier this year and want to read more of Dumas. I remember reading The Man in the Iron Mask ages ago, but do not remember  if I read Twenty Years After or not, and I’m thinking not, which means I skipped a book in the series of books about D’Artagnan and the rest. I originally had the last two books in the set in my cart as well but decided to get those after I finish these two. I will eventually have all five though, mark my words!

I’ve been wanting to read more of my own country’s works, so I got Eudora Welty (who I adored in my Southern Lit classes in high school and college!) and Zelda’s book. Amanda read Save Me the Waltz this year and it made her top ten for the year which makes me excited for it. Not to mention I find Zelda fascinating.

It occurred to me this week though I would like to read more nonfiction and I wish I had purchased a few. Specifically I would like to read some biographies and such about the authors I am read. I started my Narnia set yesterday which made me interested in CS Lewis. I don’t know much about him, other than he was a Christian and great friend of JRR Tolkien. So I picked up The Narnian by Alan Jacobs. I hope I can finish it. I think I’m going to challenge myself this year to read at least one nonfiction book a month. Too bad there are no nonfiction challenges out there, they really seem to help me get through books!

So there you have it. Pretty good haul, I’d say.

2006 has been a great year for reading for me. I didn’t get to everything I meant to read (Margaret Atwood for one, War and Peace for another) but I did get to a lot I did mean to read. I read my first graphic novels (Fables, Maus I and II, Marjane Satrapi) and fell hard for the genre. I read more classics than I have read since I graduated from college; over 6 years ago! And, as of this posting, I’ve read 63 books which exceeds my goal of 60 and is far more than I read last year, when I finished number 52 on the last day of the year.

And the best thing of this year? Last October, my grandmother passed away. I lost so many things that day. I lost my mother, my best friend, and, my reading partner. I’d already been blogging for about a year, but around February or so this year I discovered the world of lit bloggers. And in some ways, you all helped fill that void that was in my heart with your beautifully composed thoughts on books, words, literature, and life itself. You gave something back to me, friends who loved books as much as I did, who laughed and cried over the words and understood just what magic there was inside the covers of a book; and bought them as voraciously as I did as well. And you led me to grow and change as a reader, pushing me to try things I never had before and making me grow. And for that, I am eternally grateful.

Now, as I look back over the year, there are several books that really stand out over the rest. So here, I give you the top ten books I read this past year, in no particular order, except for the first one.

Number one, by far, was The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Moving, eloquent, and both heartbreakingly hopeful and disparaging at the same time, this book has stayed with me since the day I finished it. Liesel Meminger is an unforgettable character. As is Death. Unforgettable and definitely will be reread. Another favorite was another book my Zusak. I Am The Messenger, while totally different from The Book Thief, still had the beautiful prose and amazing storytelling of this amazing author. I’ll be looking for more by him this year. Along with these young adult novels I also enjoyed Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (again) and New Moon. I still can’t put my finger on just what it is about these books that makes them so obsess-able, because I am obsessed with them. Can’t wait for the next in the series!

I received an advanced reader copy of The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield and was immediately in love with the cover. Once read, the story found a lasting place in my heart, which I shouted from the rooftops of my blog. Also a definite reread. Along the same lines, I found Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier to be an un-put-downable read that became an instant favorite. Will definitely reread this as well.

Thanks to the RIP Challenge I readThe Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. It was instant love affair. Will be reading more by Mr. Collins next year for sure.

I don’t know why I waited SO long, but I read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the first time this year. Oh how I wish I had read this as a teenager! But I am so thankful that I finally did, as Austen proved to be a witty and amusing read. I will definitely be reading more by her this coming year as well, starting with Emma, probably next month!

And, thanks to my new found love of graphic novels I found Fables and Maus. Totally different comics, but both brilliant. Fables was as fascinating for it’s characters as Maus was for it’s heartbreaking story. The art work in Fables can be breathtaking. Maus’s art is completely different, but perfect for the story it is telling. Not a graphic novel to be missed.

So there you have it. My reading year in review. Soon, the year to come, and the list of books I got with that $100 gift certificate. And psst, I have $35 to spend at B&N soon!

Les had a great idea for her Thursday Thirteen yesterday, 13 books from her wish list she would like Santa to bring her.   I usually have a very hard time getting anyone to get my books for Christmas, or my birthday for that matter.  I can’t understand why…it’s my favorite thing in the world besides Ellie, breathing, and food.  And I get all three of those all the time!! 

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell because I want to read it.  Duh.

The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor.  I love it when authors take a story and do something knew with it.  I know some people don’t, but I love it.  This is a continuation, of sorts, of Alice in Wonderland. 

Fables: Wolves by Bill Willingham and Co. see above.  I love Fables.  SO brilliant.

The Burning Time by Robin Morgan.  Saw this on Danielle’s blog.  Sounds really good.

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. Again, saw on Danielle’s blog.  Sounds really good.

Armadale by Wilkie Collins. Because I love Mr. Collins and my life’s goal is to read all his books. 

And so to bed…: Handknits and Things by Lucinda Guy because she has the cutest knit patterns for kids ever.

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spencer.  I adore this when I read it in college and lost my copy.  I want to read it again so badly.

Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer.  Yes, I know it’s not published yet.  That doesn’t stop me from wanting it though!  I need more Edward and Jacob.  (I foresee me rereading either Twilight or New Moon in the very near future.)

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton.  Want to give her another chance.  I hated Ethan Frome.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle because I want to read it all and I want to read it in order.  I’m anal that way.

Wolf Boy by Evan Kuhlman because it looks really good.  A boy creates a comic book to help cope with the grief of loosing his brother.  Comics included.

Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose by Constance Hale and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager and the Doomed by Karen Elizabeth Gordon.   Because I need all the help I can get with my writing!