Counting Calories

Summer Book Buying Ban...pffft.  My Summer Slimdown seems to be lightening my bookshelf about as much it's lightening my hair (which is to say, of course, that it isn't.)  Between book clubs and review copies, I'm nearly done in.  I counted 12 new books that came into my house in the last month!  And me thinking I'm slimming down...

Two PaperbackSwap books came my way: Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (I read this on my Kindle and needed a real copy) and The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton.  At least one of them I've already read, so that's not exactly making my shelf heavier.

I have two book clubs, and they each meet every four weeks or so, but for some reason I bought four book club books in the last month.  I guess July I was procrastinating and August I was on the ball.  For my Monday Night book club, I didn't read (because I was out of town, missed the meeting, and loaned the book to someone else) Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell.  I need to read The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff before the end of the month.  For my Thursday Night book club (which may start to meet on Monday nights...this might get confusing) I just finished reading The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama (my review here) and am excited to read Little Bee by Chris Cleave next.

More review books than usual came to me in the last month as well.  I received Anne Bradstreet by D.B. Kellogg from BookSneeze, Where's My Stuff by Samantha Moss and Crap from Zest Books (my review of Crap) and Masquerade by Nancy Moser from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers (I must learn to be more judicious in my Early Reviewer requests...I had no idea I'd requested this one.)

Finally, I hid two of my own choices in the mix.  My excuse is that I needed to place my order with Amazon immediately from my phone, and they were already in my cart...deleting them or moving them to my wishlist seemed like too much work at that point.  First is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (impulse buy based off of a review on The Blue Bookcase).  I finished this today, and plan on blowing through the other: Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George (Junior Fiction) tonight.  I was waffling on buying this one, but after remembering how much I enjoyed her Dragon Slippers series, I decided to go for it.


So there it is:  12 new books in the last month or so.  I was wondering why my shelf didn't seem any lighter.