Monday Musings

Books finally came in for me at the library! It apparently takes a week for movement from one branch to another... That's crazy! Three more are in movement right now, so maybe tomorrow? I am going to have to stay off the library web site. I brought three books home and then requested four more! I do have books of my own to read, so I will have to block the site for a month or something... Anyway, I got:

Only in Canada, You Say: A Treasury of Canadian Language by Katherine Barber
Birds of a Feather: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear
The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman

I have already started the Barber book. I find it really interesting! Words or phrases that I hear or use all the time are Canadianisms. I am not sure if that is how you would spell that if it was a word, but anyway! I highlighted a few interesting ones, so hopefully I can have a discussion of this book when I review it. I want to hear other countries impressions of both whether they are only Canadian and if you think we are crazy for saying them! (And, yes, this goes beyond eh!).

Then, I got two books in the mail on Friday and never mentioned them:
A Member of the Family by Cesar Millan (I read his other two books in 2007, I think)
Cybele's Secret by Juliet Marillier (a companion book to Wildwood Dancing which I read in 2007, too, I think.)

Today, I won a book. Yay!
The New Space Opera edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan

Thanks Carl!

Speaking of Carl. The books I requested from the library?
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby (Nymeth is quite the fangirl)
Castle Waiting by Linda Medley
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
The Starry Rift edited by Jonathan Strahan (This is why the Carl reference. He told me I should get this, so I did! Actually, it came up when I was looking for Uglies and I figured that meant it was looking for me...)

Anyway, I should probably vacuum. I have been putting it off for like 3 hours now!

I Won a Book!

Well, I won the book a while ago, but for some reason I was not receiving emails from the person I won it from, so it has been a while from then to now, when I actually have said book in my hands. Anyways, I won the book from Dovegrey from Dovegrey Scribbles. She did it the most interesting way. She wrote all the names on post-it notes and made her cat walk around through them, and the one that stuck was the winner! And that winner was me! So, all the way from the other side of the sea, I received The Extra Large Medium by Helen Slavin. I have never heard of this book before, but that's good, I wanted a book I had never heard of before. Something different. Well, actually, I was just looking for the book description to share, and this book is not even out in Canada yet. Even better! It is like an advanced reading copy.

So, from the UK amazon, this is what the book is about:

Annie Colville works the only customer service desk for the dead. Alternately wearied and amused by the petty trivialities of heirlooms and everlasting arguments, she tries to live a real life through her job at the University. There, picking over skeletons in the archaeology labs, she finds she's only too ready to fall in love with the enigmatic Evan Bees. But when Evan vanishes, Annie finds there is no one to help her walk the line between the living and the dead. As the messages become darker, so Annie begins to become a ghost at the edges of her own life. Until the night, the Dead mention the name 'Arthur' and the frayed edges of the past begin to knit themselves into the future.

I personally really like the title. Thanks Dovegrey! I look forward to reading this book in February.