Road Trip Book Haul

The hubby and I recently took our youngest daughter to get settled into college. She has gone off to Colorado for school and it required us to stop in Kansas overnight. Now what does a die hard thrifter like myself NEED to do to kill a little time on a road trip? That's right-I needed to hit the local Goodwill store and I scored some interesting sounding books for super cheap! I also hit the Goodwill store in Ft. Collins where I found some additional bargains. Along the way I bought two books at Barnes & Noble (one that I had to have on release day and one that just leapt into my arms), one book at a very cute independent book store, and one book at a local used book store. That brought my total of books purchased on our trip to over 40. I have to say that number sort of surprised me. It didn't feel like I bought that many books. (Ya'll believe that right?) Any hoo, I highly recommend trolling through the book departments of thrift stores as a form of book therapy. It successfully helped distract me from the fact that I was turning my baby loose and was only days from becoming an empty nester. Well, it helped a little anyway! I still have books piled up from my local Goodwill that I need to haul, and a book box that I received that I will add as well. I'll do those a little later as an August book haul. After all of the book organizing that I've just done, I am now back to stacking books in piles around the house. I guess that I will be buying more bookcases soon. That's a bookish problem that I love having!

Happy Reading!

Monica

My B&N Purchases:

Amazon (This is one of my favorite reads so far this year and the book I HAD to grab on release day.) You can read my review here.

This is the way the world ends, for the last time.

The season of endings grows darker, as civilization fades into the long cold night.

Essun -- once Damaya, once Syenite, now avenger -- has found shelter, but not her daughter. Instead there is Alabaster Tenring, destroyer of the world, with a request. But if Essun does what he asks, it would seal the fate of the Stillness forever.

Far away, her daughter Nassun is growing in power - and her choices will break the world.

Amazon A dark, gritty urban fantasy debut set in modern-day San Francisco, filled with gods, sinister government agencies, and worlds of dark magic hidden just below the surface.

When a secret government agency trying to enslave you isn’t the biggest problem you’re facing, you’re in trouble.

Erik, a former teen star living in San Francisco, thought his life was complicated; having his ex-boyfriend in jail because of the scandal that destroyed his career seemed overwhelming. Then Erik learned he was Blooded: descended from the Gods.

Struggling with a power he doesn’t understand and can barely control, Erik discovers that a secret government agency is selling off Blooded like lab rats to a rival branch of preternatural beings in ’Zebub—San Francisco’s mirror city in an alternate dimension.

Lil, a timid apprentice in ’Zebub, is searching for answers to her parents’ sudden and mysterious deaths. Surrounded by those who wish her harm and view her as a lesser being, Lil delves into a forgotten history that those in power will go to dangerous lengths to keep buried.

What neither Erik nor Lil realize is that a darkness is coming, something none have faced in living memory. It eats. It hunts. And it knows them. In The Root, the dark and surging urban fantasy debut from Na’amen Tilahun, two worlds must come together if even a remnant of one is to survive.

My purchases from the two Colorado book stores. 

The Old Firehouse Books is a cute little used/new book store that had lots of goodies. I was able to walk away with only one book (Freshwater Road), a bookmark, and a few buttons. 

Amazon I didn't even know that Denise Nicholas had written a book so I snatched this one up. 

From award-winning actress Denise Nicholas: a ten-year anniversary reissue of her powerful and dramatic coming of age story set in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Freshwater Road has been called one of the best novels written about the Civil Rights Movement. Nicholas herself has been praised repeatedly over the years for her beautiful prose and is continually mentioned along with Alice Walker and Ernest J. Gaines as the most important novelists documenting this era.

When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in Freedom Summer, she's assigned to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier. As the long, hot summer unfolds, Celeste befriends several members of the community, but there are also those who are threatened by her and the change that her presence in the South represents. Finding inner strength as she helps lift the veil of oppression and learns valuable lessons about race, social change, and violence, Celeste prepares her adult students for their showdown with the county registrar. All the while, she struggles with loneliness, a worried father in Detroit, and her burgeoning feelings for Ed Jolivette, a young man also in Mississippi for the summer.

By summer's end, Celeste learns there are no easy answers to the questions that preoccupy her — about violence and nonviolence, about race, identity, and color, and about the strength of love and family bonds. In Freshwater Road, Denise Nicholas has created an unforgettable story that — more than ten years after first appearing in print — continues to be one of the most cherished works of Civil Rights fiction.

Book Lovers Used Books was fun to look through. The prices were cheaper than new, but not dirt cheap. I paid $9.50 for my like new copy of Lilith's Brood. 

Amazon  Lilith Iyapo is in the Andes, mourning the death of her family, when war destroys Earth. Centuries later, she is resurrected -- by miraculously powerful unearthly beings, the Oankali. Driven by an irresistible need to heal others, the Oankali are rescuing our dying planet by merging genetically with mankind. But Lilith and all humanity must now share the world with uncanny, unimaginably alien creatures: their own children. This is their story... 

The rest of the haul is from the Salina, KS and Fort Collins, CO Goodwill stores. In the interest of space I am not going to feature books that I have either featured here on the blog before, or I am iffy about. The two that I am not sure about, but I grabbed because they were a quarter each, are The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and Same Kind Of Different As Me by Ron Hall. Both of these are stories that may make me angry while reading, so I am not even sure why I grabbed them. The only excuse is that I was in a book buying frenzy and willing to take a risk when they were only costing me twenty five cents each!