Everything Must Go to my book shelf

Borders is apparently filing for bankruptcy. Part of this includes (unsurprisingly) closing a ton of stores. As a selfish creature, the ones I'm concerned about are all of the Austin locations. Sad face.

And while this makes me sad for the obvious reasons - people need jobs, I dislike leaving the house so having a book store nearby is obviously better, it's a book store, even if it is a large chain, and any book store closing is a small tragedy. Because books.

The small upside is the oh crap, we're closing sale. Oh yes. Because I need to have even more books if I'm to realize my plan of eventually building bookshelves out of books. I understand that's a stupid plan, but it's really the only storage solution for my obsessive book hoarding that I can come up with. Bookshelves are expensive, yo.

My spending spree wasn't at all helped by the fact that I hadn't been to buy books in a while and so had quite the list. Seeing me attempt to self edit choices was probably at once pathetic and terribly amusing. There was much put upon sighing and weighing options in my hands and looking at the fluorescents as if they had any sort of opinion.

And what resulted is most certainly on the wrong side of nutty. But I'm rather proud of myself because it wasn't as nutty as I wanted it to be. Way to tone down the crazy, self!




I know. I know. It's still the definition of a ridiculous stack.

Just in case anyone's curious, here's a more readable list:

First Lord's Fury - Jim Butcher
Cold Magic - Kate Elliot
13, rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro
A Short History of Everything - Bill Bryson
Machine of Death - edited by North, Bennardo and Malki !
The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear - Walter Moers
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
The Years of Rice and Salt - Kim Stanley Robinson
Ghost Stories - edited by Peter Washington
The Best of Wodehouse
Blackout - Connie Willis
All Clear - Connie Willis

I hardly know where to start first. So many favorites! So many new things!

Also, you get a hint of this from the ridiculous stack photo, but here's how awful the cover for Rebecca is:




Hahahaha! I'm not usually one to quibble about cover design - for the most part I'm more interested in, you know, the actual book.* But man, what design team decided that a classic Harlequin cover minus the Fabio was the way to go? I can't believe that anyone involved had read a synopsis, let alone the actual book. Too funny.

I did notice something during my excess of materialism though. I used to be one of those people that would head off happily to the book store or library with nothing in particular in mind and pick up some randomness. Where now that I'm an internet addict I primarily have lists of recommended books. I still occasionally grab something random (and have found some real winners) which makes me think I ought to try that more, as even with all the careful reading of reviews from a plethora of sources I've ended up with some real stinkers.

In other words, why go through the trouble of researching if I have as much success with the 'well that looks fun' method? And because I'm nosy, how do you pick books?

* To be fair, I will always love a good cover, tired platitudes aside. It's the mediocre or just plain bad ones that usually slip beneath the radar. I like pretty pictures, ok?