, , and I took a road trip down to Portland today to try out Paul’s new Mini on the road. And, because you cannot of course go to Portland without doing this, we stopped at the mighty, mighty Powell’s–both the main store and their Hawthorne store since Paul was on the hunt for an original Donning/Starblaze edition of the fourth Elfquest graphic novel. Me, I wanted to hunt down quite a few things on my Powell’s wishlist, but only walked out with one thing that was actually on it and three that weren’t.

Here then are all of my recently purchased books, not only from Powell’s but from Third Place and Barnes and Noble as well. Note that these are of course all print books! And this brings the yearly total up to 125.

• Bought from Third Place: Amelia Peabody’s Egypt, which I’d been wanting for a while, really, but hadn’t gotten around to yet! This is a big ol’ companion volume to Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series, of course, with a lot of detail about archaeology and Egypt in the time frame of the books, as well as a lot of backstory detail on all the major characters. I’m FOR it!
• Bought from Barnes and Noble: The Crow Road, by Iain Banks. Recommended to me by @revspaced on Twitter, who says this is one of his non-SF works. What sold me was the opening sentence: “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
• Bought from Powell’s: Jane Slayre, yet another in the ongoing fad of classical novel + monster mashups. This one is, of course, a spin off of Jane Eyre, only this time it’s got vampires and werewolves.
• Bought from Powell’s: Precious Dragon and The Shadow Pavilion, by (Liz Williams). Books 3 and 4 of her Detective Inspector Chen series, on which I seriously need to get caught up.
• Bought from Powell’s: Euryale, by Kara Dalkey. Fantasy, set in ancient Rome.

It’s worth noting that I also had to get myself a Powell’s T-shirt, just because I found one that managed to poke fun at both Star Wars and bookstore cats at the same time! You can see it on Powell’s T-shirts page; scroll down to the bottom to the Fup 19 shirt.

And watch this space for further book updates! Feed by ‘s alter ego Mira Grant is, as 28 Days Later so aptly put it, extremely fucking nigh. I will be devouring this at my earliest opportunity. Rumor has it it’s already escaped into the wild even though its official release date is May 1. Because zombies do that escaping thing, you know.