Back Online

So our streak of terrible luck continues. No sooner does my husband get out of the hospital than everything at our house decides to break at once...most importantly my less-than-two-year-old laptop. The monitor just completely died. It's no longer under warranty, and the Geek Squad told us it would be about $300 to put in a new monitor on the laptop itself. So we decided to go the cheaper route and just buy a new stand-alone monitor and hook it to the laptop.

So that explains where I've been for the last few weeks. It's seemed like an eternity without being able to blog and read everyone else's posts. I have NO IDEA what's been going on in the blogosphere in my absence. The good news, however, is that I managed to read four books in my time away from the computer. FOUR! In like three weeks! That's some kind of record for me. I guess the internet is the culprit, after all, in the time suckage of my life.

Well, I fully intend to get back to my internet-heavy life now. I'll be catching up on everyone's blogs and hopefully posting reviews for those books (mostly REALLY good, with one little exception of okay-ness) for the next week or so. I'm a little scared to look at my Google Reader, but here I go anyway. Missed all y'all a LOT!

Recent Acquisitions

I've glutted myself with new books in the last week! How exciting! Eight, count 'em EIGHT, new books arrived in the mail or walked in the door with me since last Sunday. Most of them were thanks to Christmas gift cards that I'm just now getting around to spending. One was a Mooch.

So what did I get?

-Apocalypse Happens, by Lori Handeland (third in the paranormal romance series The Phoenix Chronicles. I got the first one from LibraryThing and I flew through it. Reading the second one now...fourth one comes out in April!)

-Warlock of the Witch World, by Andre Norton (I'm collecting this series from the 60's...love the covers!)

-Murder at Monticello, by Rita Mae Brown (Also collecting this series about a mystery-solving cat. Haven't read any of them yet, but that doesn't stop me from buying them!)

-Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer (YA novel about the subject of Degas' famous sculpture "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen")

-Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link (weird, gothic-horror, sci-fi-esque short stories)

-A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore (winner of the very first Orange Prize!)

-The Forge, by T.S. Stribling (first in a trilogy about the Civil War-torn South)

-The Essential Tales of Chekhov, edited by Richard Ford (self-explanatory, I think. Trying to read more Russian lit, with Doctor Zhivago last year and now this book)

These books will join the hundred others on my shelves, to be read only God knows when. But it makes me all squirmy and happy to have had such a windfall this week. LOVE LOVE LOVE getting new books!