Too much mail

[andyhat]

I'd forgotten what it's like to come home to a week's worth of mail all at once:

That's just what actually came home from my box at The UPS Store; all the junk mail and extraneous packaging has been trashed already.

The squirrel plushy is a "free gift" from amazon accompanying Rune Factory 2. Other games on the stack are Luminous Arc 2, The Last Remnant, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, and Soul Calibur IV.

Below those are books and booklike magazines: The Hounds of Skaith by Leigh Brackett (Planet Stories), The Dark World by Henry Kuttner (Planet Stories), The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs and the Currently Accepted Habits of Nature by David Niall Wilson (Bad Moon Books), Population Zero by Wrath James White (Cargo Cult Press), Islington Crocodiles by Paul Meloy (TTA Press), Crimewave Ten: Now You See Me (TTA Press), The New York Tyrant Vol. 2 No. 2, Subterfuge (Special Edition) edited by Ian Whates (Newcon Press), the poetry chapbook War by Harold Pinter (Faber & Faber), Cool Thing: The Best New Gay Fiction from Young American Writers edited by Blair Mastbaum & Will Fabro (Running Press), The Best of Lucius Shepard (with accompanying volume Skull City and Other Lost Stories) (Subterranean Press), and Marveltown by Bruce McCall (FSG).

Magazines are new issues of The Week, The Economist, The New Yorker, Black: Australian Dark Culture, the now sadly ended Flytrap, The Lutheran, The Advocate, Realms of Fantasy, Consumer Reports, Genre, Sport Diver, Out, Weird Tales, Gramophone, Talebones, One Story, Overland, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and the New York Observer.

I guess I should go read some stuff now.

Comments

[mroctober.livejournal.com]

I'd love to hear your thoughts on Cool Thing.

[badger.livejournal.com]

The Hounds of Skaith by Leigh Brackett

I remember the Skaith novels.

[sensational.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to ask: Do you get all of these books and things as part of a job, or do you buy them? What do you do?

[andyhat.livejournal.com]

I wish I could figure out how to get books as part of a job, but until that happens I have to buy the books I want. I keep trying to cut back, but apparently that's not working so well.

By day, I'm a data warehouse architect, currently working for a small start-up in Durham (about which I'm very careful to not blog anything).

New York Tyrant

[(Anonymous)]

Read that new Tyrant first. It's damn good.

Your Library

[pnew8.livejournal.com]

*envy*

[dailyafirmation.livejournal.com]

What percentage of the books you buy do you actually get a chance to read? And do you read parts of them or all of them?

I'm a big fan of a library card, where if I don't read a book at all (or even only partially), I can "get my money back." :-)

[andyhat.livejournal.com]

I love short stories, so I dip into most of the collections and anthologies. I also try to read most of the novellas I get. I'm bad when it comes to novels, however; I'd guess I get to 25% or fewer of my acquisitions there (OTOH, I also tend to buy fewer novels; only two of this week's books are novels, and those are on subscription).

I'd love to be able to use the library more, but the North Regional branch (which was already not terribly close) moved even further away, so it's not very convenient. My purchases also tend to run to smaller presses they don't always carry; of this week's books, only one (Marveltown) is even in Wake County's catalog, and that one's "on order". Checking Worldcat, UNC has a copy of the Pinter chapbook, and Greeensboro, Forsyth, and Cumberland have the Lucius Shepard; but then I'd have to wait for ILL, and even that doesn't work for the rest.

[dailyafirmation.livejournal.com]

Fair enough! Thanks for responding.

[lemuriapress.livejournal.com]

Hey, this is Erik Mona, the publisher of Planet Stories here. I just wanted to drop by and give you a personal thanks for picking up some of our books and also for mentioning them on your blog. Planet Stories is still a relatively tiny imprint, and any exposure really helps.