Piling On – 1 October 2008

Yeesh. I’ve been putting off this post for a while. Here’s the books I’ve acquired since the last listing on 15 July. Don’t let me slide on this again!

I’ll no longer be including free electronic books in this list; assume I’m putting them in my collection when included on the Free Books roundups. Those e-books for which I fork over good money, those will be included here.

Actually, speaking of that, let’s include the only e-book I’ve ever paid for right now.

• September 2008 Asimov’s Science Fiction from FictionWise. Already reviewed.

I received a few books for review from authors, publishers, and promoters.

• American Wife / Curtis Sittenfeld requested by me through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. Already reviewed.
• Extraordinary Engines / Nick Gevers (ed.) requested by me through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program.
• Return to the Middle Kingdom / Yuan-tsung Chen. Review requested by promoter and already posted.
• Knight’s Fork / Rowena Cherry. Received this after I lumped Chick Lit and Romance together in one of my Free Books roundups. Ms. Cherry wrote on the envelope Not chick lit!. Futuristic Romance according to the A.R.C. copy. I probably won’t read and review this. I opened to a couple random pages and saw lines like Being incurably chivalrous, and cursed with an indifferent sex drive, ’Rhett might leave the inconvenient chastity belt in place. If a Seattle area reader wants to take a crack at this, I’ll trade my copy for a review for Rat’s Reading.
• Read, Remember, Recommend / Rachelle Rogers Knight. After linking to one of Bibliopages’ book contests, Ms. Knight sent me a copy of her reading journal. Although it seems pretty decent on quick perusal I probably won’t include a review on Rat’s Reading since I won’t use it for my actual book journal. This blog is my reading journal and I use LibraryThing and Amazon to track my catalog and wish lists. I find I’m more consistent about keeping them updated when they are online. If you know a reader who isn’t a creature of the internet like I am this journal might be the thing.

The following were all books I’ve purchased in the last couple of months.

• The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection / Gardner Dozois (ed.). From Powells.com. By the way, this spring I started including Powells.com links on all new reviews. It seems a fair number of people who clicked through on the Amazon links bought used books. Except Amazon doesn’t sell the used books itself; those are third party sales facilitated by Amazon. The big online used sites work similarly. Powells is the Mecca of used books on the west coast, and their sales aren’t third party. So if you want a used copy, click the Powells link because you know you are going to get a decent copy and you aren’t dealing with an Ebay-like middleman.
• The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection / Gardner Dozois (ed.). From Powells.com.
• Metropolitan / Walter Jon Williams. From Powells.com.
• Brasyl / Ian McDonald. From Powells.com.
• Zahrah the Windseeker / Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu. From Amazon and as part of a commitment to read five of the top ten obscure speculative fiction works as selected by Feminist SF The Blog. Already reviewed.
• Solstice / Ulises Silva. Another one of the five Feminist SF works. Already reviewed.
• Midnight Robber / Nalo Hopkinson. Another one of the five Feminist SF works. This is next up on my reading list after I finished my current Dozois anthology.
• The Fox Woman / Kij Johnson. Fourth of the five Feminist SF works.
• Swordspoint / Ellen Kushner. Last of the five Feminist SF works I selected.
• Ragamuffin / Tobias S. Buckell. Already reviewed.
• Last Argument of Kings / Joe Abercrombie. I ignited a mini-firestorm this spring with my review of the previous book in this series with some incendiary comments in an otherwise positive review. Will my view on this one prove less flammable? I sure hope so.
• Universe 12 / Terry Carr (ed.). From The Bookcase in Qualicum Beach, BC.
• Away / Amy Bloom. From The Mulberry Bush Book Store in Qualicum Beach, BC. At the end of my vacation last month I had about $50 CAN left. Rather than convert it back, I decided to just buy books.
• Web of Evil / J. A. Jance. Also from the Mulberry Bush.
• The Golden Spruce / John Vaillant. Also from the Mulberry Bush.

Everything else in this entry came from the Michael’s Books boxes of free books.

• The Get With the Program! Guide to Good Eating / Bob Greene.
• You on a Diet / Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz.
• Born to Grill / Cheryl Jamison and Bill Jamison.
• Everyday Cooking with Dr. Dean Ornish / Dean Ornish.
• Organizational Behavior Third Edition / Linda K. Stroh, Gregory B. Northcraft, and Margaret A. Neale.
• Physical Geology Second Edition / Rochard Foster Flint and Brian J. Skinner.
• Native North Americans: An Ethnohistorical Approach / Daniel L. Boxberger (ed.)
Managerial Economics and Business Strategy Fifth Edition / Michael R. Baye.Corporate Information Strategy and Management Seventh Edition / Lynda M. Applegate, Robert D. Austin, and F. Warren McFarlan.
• Economics of Strategy Second Edition / David Besanko, David Dranove, and Mark Shanley.
• Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues / Pyong Gap Min (ed.)
• The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthopological Approach / Dale F. Eickelman
• Asian Americans: An Interpretive History / Sucheng Chan
• The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature Fifth Edition / Michael Meyer
• The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women Second Edition / Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar.
• The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces Sixth Edition Volume 2 / Maynard Mack (ed.)
• MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers Sixth Edition / Joseph Gibaldi.
• Cliffs Notes on Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
• Cliffs Notes on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
• Cliffs Notes on Atwood’s THe Handmaid’s Tale
• Cliffs Notes on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus & Antigone.
• Monarch Notes William Shakespeare’s Othello
• The Wrong Murder / Craig Rice.
• The Right Murder / Craig Rice.
• The Ox-Bow Incident / Walter Van Tilburg Clark.
• East Wind West Wind / Pearl S. Buck.
• Rough Crossings / Simon Schama.
• Getting Things Done / David Allen.
• Dancing at the Rascal Fair / Ivan Doig.
• Invented Moralities / Jeffrey Weeks.
• The Safety of Objects / A. M. Homes.
• The Last Time They Met / Anita Shreve.
• The Jane Austen Book Club / Karen Joy Fowler.
• The Bounty / Derek Walcott.
• Five Great Short Stories / Anton Chekhov.
• Daylight in Nightclub Inferno / Elena Lappin (ed.)
• The New Writings of the South / Charles East (ed.)
• Boy / Roald Dahl.
• Mohawk / Richard Russo.
• Turn on the Heat / A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner).
• Mildred Pierce / James M. Cain.
• The Cider House Rules / John Irving
• The Misanthrope and Other Plays / Molière
• The Ides of March / Thornton Wilder
• The Sackett Brand / Louis L’Amour
• The Time Machine / H. G. Wells. Already have a copy, but grabbed this for giving away or something like that.
• Thyme of Death / Susan Wittig Albert
• Mind Transfer / Janet Asimov
• Inherit the Stars / James P. Hogan
• Cabal / Clive Barker
• A House in Space / Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.
• Tobacco Road / Erskine Caldwell
• The Bad Place / Dean R. Koontz
• The Iron Sun / Adrian Berry
• Moving Into Space / Larry Geis and Fabrice Florin (eds.)
• Bang the Drum Slowly / Mark Harris
• Blood Oath / David Morrell
• Death Takes Passage / Sue Henry
• Antarctica / Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Widening Gyre / Robert B. Parker. Wasn’t sure if I already had this one or not, so I grabbed it. Turns out I did have a copy.
The Micro Millennium / Christopher Evans
• The End of the Affair / Graham Greene
• Flowers for Algernon / Daniel Keyes
• Nova / Samuel R. Delany
• The Gentle Giants of Ganymede / James P. Hogan
• Giant’s Star / James P. Hogan
• Code of the Lifemaker / James P. Hogan
• Buying Time / Joe Haldeman
• Black Holes / Jerry Pournelle (ed.)
• The Road to the Stars / Ian Nicolson
• The Genesis Machine / James P. Hogan
• Redshift Rendezvous / John E. Stith
• A Wreath of Stars / Bob Shaw
• Hard Wired / Walter Jon Williams
• With Open Hands / Henri J. M. Nouwen
• The Vintage Mencken / H. L. Mencken
• Games People Play / Eric Berne
• Granta 87 / Ian Jack (ed.)

Photo Hoard – Global Consulting Group Installation by Peter Walsh used under a Creative Commons By-Nc-Nd 2.0 license.