Recent Acquisitions

It's already February and I never posted about my holiday acquisitions!  Not only did I receive some nice books for Christmas, I also did a little shopping, both online and in a post-holiday trip to New York.

Here's what was under the Christmas tree:

Two audiobooks:  Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen AND A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin;

Two books I really really wanted:  Life Below Stairs by Sian Evans (to feed my Downton Abbey addiction); and The Earth by Emile Zola. . . . and (drumroll, please. . . )

The Great Penguin Bookchase game!!  I've been coveting this ever since I read about it on Thomas' blog My Porch.  Thanks for telling me about it, Thomas!   I haven't played it yet but I've had a lot of fun putting all the tiny little stickers on the books.

The week after Christmas I took my parents up to my favorite bookstore in the Lone Star State:  Bookpeople in Austin!  We had a lovely day and I bought two more books (for which I paid full price, supporting my local independent bookstore!):

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin and Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner

And a few days after Christmas I took my youngest on a her first-ever girl trip to New York City!!  One of the highlights was visiting Tom, one of my dear friends from college whom I hadn't seen in ages!  We were invited to a book exchange party -- everyone brought their favorite book from 2011 and we all talked about our books and swapped.  My contribution was The Annotated Persuasion by Jane Austen.  Here's what I brought home:

Operation Mincemeat by Ben MacIntyre.   I haven't read much nonfiction lately but I am interested in WWII.  Also, this book is actually related to one of the Persephones I read in 2011, Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper.  I don't want to give anything else away but if you plan on reading all the Persephones, don't read this book until you do, because it would give away a major plot point.  That's all I'll say.

But back to the New York trip!  Aside from visiting friends, museums, and the fashion district, we did a little book shopping -- honestly, I can't think of a single trip I've taken in the past few years when I didn't come home with at least one new book!  Naturally, we had to visit The Strand Bookstore in the Village.  I managed to keep my purchases down to only two books from the sale table in the basement:

Two more NYRB Classics to add to my collection (mostly unread!):  Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford and My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley.  And to my delight, my daughter bought a new book for the airplane ride home -- one of my all-time favorites, Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones!

On the way back to our hotel, we also stopped by Books of Wonder, the amazing children's bookstore, where I bought two more books:  

The Story of The Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit and a Welsh-language copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone!  This brings my total of foreign language Harry Potters to twelve in all.  

And by the end of the month I had broken down and made two more online purchases:

I had to buy The Last Chronicle of Barset because I finished the third book in the Barsetshire Chronicles, based on my reading of the wonderful Doctor Thorne (most of which I read while flying home from New York, because my flight was delayed).   My library doesn't even own a copy!  The fact that it's almost 900 pages long and there are two more books in between shall be ignored.

Finally, one of my online groups is reading one of the latest Persephones: 

It's Greenbanks by Dorothy Whipple.  I've read two other books by her so far and loved them both.  We shall disregard the fact that there are three more on the TBR shelf unread, right?

Good thing I didn't sign up for the challenge where you don't buy any more books for the first three months of the year.  I would have utterly failed again!