IMM: I never come home empty-handed!

Yes, my friends, once again I have been allowed out unsupervised!  This is quite surprising since the book-acquisition situation in our house is currently at breaking point again (oops) - so much so that when I mentioned my little excursion to my sister on MSN yesterday morning, her first reaction was, "Does Mum know?"  Which sums it up fairly succinctly, I think.  :)

First up, let me say that I did REMOVE six books from the house on the same day, so this isn't all a one-sided story.  I took four library books back, for a start.  One was finished and reviewed (The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman), and three were rapidly approaching their Final Deadline and just wouldn't have been read in time.  I brought Karin Slaughter's Skin Privilege back to the shop, and also Belle de Jour's Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, which I'd been reading sporadically over the last couple of months and was starting to become a bit much of a muchness.  Done, gone, better things to read...

Like my NEW batch of library books, for example!  (How was that for a segue?!)  I wasn't actually anticipating getting quite so many, mostly because I've still got a few at home anyway AND we're going to town (where THE BIG LIBRARY is) on Tuesday, so I was planning on keeping more spaces free on my card.  Sooooo, I reckoned I'd try and finish ONE of my current check-outs by then (probably Annexed), go through the library catalogue and my wishlist on Tuesday morning to see what they've got on the shelves, then decide what I want most and juggle them around accordingly.  Yes, I run my library trips like a military campaign, but it gets RESULTS, people!  :)

Anyway, what was I saying?  Oh yes!  Library books!  (Not such a great segue...)  I got six out yesterday - which was probably about four more than Mum hoped, but she didn't mind too much!  (Well, they don't clog up the house the same, do they?  They have to go back eventually!)  First up, a rather offbeat duo, Kurt Vonnegut's Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction and Chuck Palahniuk's Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey (which has a truly horrible cover, by the way).  I've never read Vonnegut OR Palahniuk - though I have a book by each on my shelves - but I thought I'd take a leap into the unknown.  As an added bonus, I won't be starting with their most obvious titles - Slaughterhouse Five and Fight Club - which I find curiously satisfying!

To my delight, I FINALLY managed to put my hands on a copy of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta (and at our little local library, no less!  I tried that big library three or four times and came up empty-handed!).  It'll be my first ever graphic novel, but I had a flick through it sitting on the library floor and I think I'm going to enjoy it.  It'll be another completed category for my Mixing It Up Challenge too, which is good, and I'll be able to watch the movie at last.  I also found John Marsden's Tomorrow, When the War Began.  I hadn't even heard of it until the movie came out (I haven't seen it) but the reviews are pretty overwhelmingly positive, so I'm looking forward to it.   

         

And last but not least, a couple of non-fiction books to round out the bunch.  I've enjoyed Hotel Babylon and Beach Babylon already, and have Fashion Babylon and Wedding Babylon on my shelves (each written by Imogen Edwards-Jones and an anonymous industry insider), so I've been rather looking forward to the latest addition to the series, Hospital Babylon.  Should be an interesting - if alarming - read!  My last choice was Joshua Foer's runaway hit Moonwalking with Einstein, which my sister's already read, loved and fervently recommended.  She has a copy somewhere, but I couldn't remember if she'd taken it to Liverpool with her so I grabbed it anyway!

And then I was a little bit naughty...  I sneaked along to the bookshop along the road to look at their very awesome Beats/Bob Dylan/Counterculture section. It's basically a narrow bookcase tucked in a corner, crammed with all sorts of cool stuff.  As you may remember, I bought a bunch of books off there after my birthday last year so I reckoned it was about time for another look!  There were three biographies and a huge book of Bukowski's poetry that I drooled over, but I didn't buy any of them this time.  I was just about to walk away (shock!) when I noticed a cute little pocket edition of Naked Lunch for only £5, so I bought that instead. And the best thing about it? It was the perfect size to slip into the back pocket of my jeans, under my coat, so that when Mum 'frisked me' (ie. rifled through my bag) when I got back, I came up squeaky clean and smelling of roses! Haha, sometimes I scare myself with my own evil genius. :D

As a little footnote to this story, I SAY evil genius, but evidently I still have room left for improvement, as I made the schoolboy error of leaving the draft of this post up on the screen while I went to fill up the shelves - and Mum read it.  Dammit!  Haha, at least she was SMILING when she called me a 'lying little toerag', so I reckon my book babies are safe for another day. *sighs with relief*

That's all, folks!  (For now, at least!)  Have you read any of these already?  More importantly, what's in YOUR mailbox this week?  Leave me a comment and tell me aaaaaall about it!