Tag: free books are awesome

So um, yeah, how about that pandemic then.

Like I daresay everybody else who reads my posts, I’m spending a lot of time compulsively refreshing news feeds and watching the case counts for COVID-19 go up all over the world. In Washington state, we’ve got the second highest case count in the U.S. after New York. In King County, the county I live it, we’ve got over 560 cases alone.

My household’s all okay at the moment. My day job has us all working from home. And since I am extremely grateful that I have a day job that allows me to do that, I’ve been trying to contribute what I can to fellow authors and some musicians as well. I’ll be looking at possibly signing up for some Patreons.

And for now, here’s a list of the books I just picked up. Acquired from Kobo:

• Paper and Fire, Ash and Quill, Smoke and Iron, and Sword and Pen, Books 2-5 of Rachel Caine’s Great Library series. YA, SF dystopia. Nabbing these because not only do I have a long history of loving Caine’s books, but also because she’s undergoing a second round of cancer treatment right now and whoo boy howdy is this not a good time to have to be undergoing cancer treatment. Not like there’s ever a good time, but hey.
• A Death of No Importance, by Mariah Fredericks. Mystery, book 1 of her Jane Prescott series. Got this one because it’s a period mystery, set in New York in 1910, and because it was on sale at the time for $2.99.
• The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. The third Night Vale novel. This is a pre-order because the book isn’t out yet, but it’ll be out very soon and I wanted to make sure to support the book right now. Because Night Vale has been a joy to me for years, and because the coronavirus has scuttled their ability to do their current round of touring, too.
• Lady Helena Investigates, by Jane Steen. Mystery, book 1 of her Scott-DeQuincy series. Also a period mystery, which I went ahead and grabbed because it was on sale for 99 cents.
• Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. SF/space opera. Nabbed this one because a bunch of folks have been raving about it, and because the words “lesbian space necromancers” certainly caught my attention.
• The Sun Down Motel, by Simone St. James. Mystery. Nabbed this one thanks to a splendid review of it on Smart Bitches, and because I’d recognized the author’s name as somebody who had previous books I wanted to read. I have already now read this as I write this post, and I can say I loved it. I’ll definitely be grabbing more of this author’s work now that I know I like it.
• Turning Darkness into Light, by Marie Brennan. Fantasy. Sequel to her splendid Lady Trent series, which I adored, so naturally I needed to get my mitts on this title.

Acquired from Amazon:

• Raven Heart, by Murphy Lawless. A.k.a. C.E. Murphy, who, as y’all know, is another longstanding favorite of mine. This is paranormal romance and I am certainly down for that from known good authors. <3 (Didn’t suck that she was handing it out for free at the time, either!)
• The Night Girl, by James Bow. Standalone urban fantasy, set in Toronto. Picked this up on the strength of this review by James Nicoll.
• The Richmond Thief, by Lisa Boero. Another period mystery, which I grabbed because it was on sale for 99 cents. (And fair play to Smart Bitches for their regular alerts regarding ebooks on sale!)

Acquired for free because a lot of authors are starting to offer titles for free to help tide people over during quarantine:

• High Lonesome Sound, by Jaye Wells. Southern Gothic/horror. The author is handing out this book for free until the end of April. More details are in this tweet.

35 for the year.

I’ve been doing website juggling what with having to transfer my main author site operations from angelahighland.com to angelahighland.info. Which means my more non-writing related posts are going up on annathepiper.org instead!

Like my book purchase roundups. Here’s the first for 2020.

Acquired from Kobo:

• Destiny’s Embrace, Destiny’s Surrender, and Destiny’s Captive, all by Beverly Jenkins. These are all historical romances, and specifically featuring protagonists of color in Civil-War-era (and I think post-Civil-War?) America. Jenkins has been on the Smart Bitches podcast a couple of times, and she seems delightful, so I finally bought a few of her books when I saw them on sale for $1.99 each.
• Truthwitch, by Susan Dennard. YA fantasy. Grabbed this because I had liked the cover when I first saw this one come out a couple of years ago, and because it went on sale for $2.99. (And I was slightly chagrined to see that shortly after that, Tor.com offered this as their free book for the month for January.)
• Lord of the Last Heartbeat, by May Peterson. Fantasy romance. Grabbed this because a) hey, it’s another Carina author writing fantasy romance, and b) one of the protagonists is non-binary. Awesome. \0/

Acquired from Amazon:

Grabbed all three of these because they’re titles that were pulled out of the RITAs due to the big scandal with RWA over the tail end of December and the beginning of this month. There was a nice roundup page on Amazon with links off to the titles to buy and support the authors, and these were all ones that looked interesting.

• The Magnolia Sword: A Ballad of Mulan, by Sherry Thomas. I’ve read some Thomas (her Lady Sherlock series), and I’d like to see her take on Mulan.
• The Orchid Throne, by Jeffe Kennedy. Fantasy romance. I know of Kennedy via Carina as well! And I’ve been meaning to read her work for a while now.
• Polaris Rising, by Jessie Mihalik. SF romance. Grabbed this one, I’ll say straight out, because of the similarity of title to Jupiter Ascending. If this book hits the same sort of “big silly fun” sweet spot that movie did for me, I’ll enjoy it immensely.

Acquired from Gutenberg.org:

• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman / With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, by Mary Wollstonecraft. Pulled this down from Gutenberg because we’re going to read this for book club.

Acquired so far for the year: 9