Bit of a book explosion, that

Didn’t I say something about how I wasn’t going to buy any more books until I cleared some shelf space? Ha. If you know me at all you can probably guess how long that resolve lasted. I have over the last couple of days picked up three more physical copies of books, and today, finally vowed to scan the shelves for anything I could afford to lose.

This was brought on by a couple of things. One, that one of my recent purchases was downtown at the Kinokuniya bookstore, since I was going to Uwajimaya anyway and the bookstore was right next door. I was hoping to find something else by Taichi Yamada, but no luck, so I got a book by Kobo Abe instead. (It was pretty neat to be surrounded by all those Japanese books, I must note, even though I couldn’t read the characters and even though the section with works in English was small.) And two, that I went ahead and said “okay FINE” and snarfed up a couple recent releases I wanted, from Third Place. Three, that userinfoseanan_mcguire and userinfocmpriest are in a new post-apocalyptic anthology I wanted to check out, so I got userinfosolarbird to buy me a copy of that from Soul Food Books.

So I went back down to Third Place again this afternoon and brought the nice folks who buy used books there a big ol’ bag, and as is usual, they took several of them and promised to donate the rest to the library downstairs. I figure that if I can’t get store credit for the books, having them go to the King County Library is almost as good–since that way the library can profit from them. I’ve been giving them enough book-checking-out attention lately that it’s nice to fling them some books of mine that they might be able to sell.

Some of the books I gave them were ones I hadn’t actually read yet. Some of these I have in turn re-bought in ebook form off of Fictionwise’s Stanza store, and some of the others will be bought again in that form soon enough. I have a whole bunch of older books that aren’t in ebook form of any kind; those I will be keeping since they’d be harder to replace. But I think a lot more of my new book buying, at least with untried/untrusted authors, is going to wind up being in ebook form.

Here then is the book explosion tally:

The Face of Another, by Kobo Abe
Hunting Ground, by Patricia Briggs
Skykeepers, by Jessica Andersen
Grants Pass, by a bunch of folks
Magic to the Bone, by Devon Monk
The Decoy Princess, by Dawn Cook
Armageddon’s Children, by Terry Brooks
Path of Fate, by Diana Pharoah Francis
The Serpent’s Daughter, by Suzanne Arruda

Of these, the first four were all things purchased this past week, the second four are ones re-purchased today in ebook form, and the last is the book I picked up at Third Place today, mostly paid for by the store credit they gave me! Grand total of books thus far purchased in 2009: 74.