Breakfast & Books

It was so nice to have a Breakfast & Books Date with Eric yesterday.  We had to cancel it last week because schools here were closed due to the nasty weather and the kids were home.  Two weeks between dates may not sound like very long, but it felt like it lasted forever!  Breakfast was relatively uneventful, and then we were on our way to shop for books.

The very first thing I do when we get to Barnes & Noble is check out the sale racks in the vestibule.  Usually I have absolutely no interest in those books (neither does anyone else… that’s why they’re in the vestibule), but I actually found one yesterday that I scooped up.

My mom has been reading Tana French’s books and likes them, so when I saw this hardcover edition of The Likeness on the sale rack for $5.98 I decided to grab it.  This is French’s second novel and continues to follow the main character from In the Woods, her first novel.  I haven’t read the first one (nor do I own it) so I’ll have to put this one in the TBR pile for now, but I couldn’t pass it up.

THIS is the book I was most excited to find. While Mortals Sleep is a collection of previously unpublished short stories from Kurt Vonnegut and he is one of my favorite authors. When I saw this on one of the New Arrivals tables I almost hooted out loud in the middle of the store.  There are still quite a few Vonnegut books I have yet to read, but seeing new ones still being published makes me very, very happy.

These are the two books I had already planned on buying.   I just finished reading The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks (review coming soon); The Elfstones of Shannara and The Wishsong of Shannara are the next two books in the trilogy.  It had been so long since I’d read any fiction fantasy and I had forgotten how much I enjoy it.  I’m really looking forward to reading these.

We had some other shopping to do, so we didn’t spend as much time as usual in the book store.  I did end up adding another four books to my wish list, though:

• The Autobiography of an Execution by David R. Dow:  This sounds extremely interesting to me.  Dow is the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service and a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, and this book is his memoir about defending those people who have been sentenced to the death penalty.  This book is his argument against capital punishment and I’m really interested in hearing this argued from a lawyer’s POV.
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot:  This is the true story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black mother of five who died of cervical cancer in 1951.  This book chronicles the major contribution she made to science without her knowledge or consent, and how her still poor family feels when finding out about it decades later.  I have been meaning to read this since it came out last year, but I just keep forgetting about it.  It’s now officially on my wish list.
• Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut:  As I stated above, I have quite a few Vonnegut books yet to read and this is one of them.  I really need to make a list of all his books and cross them off as I read them.  This is another of Vonnegut’s novels that features his favorite character, Kilgore Trout.
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison:  I don’t know why I’ve never read this since it’s been on my mental wish list for quite some time.  I did some research on it a while ago:  it was published in 1952 and was the only book Ellison published during his lifetime, it was on the bestseller list for weeks and it won the National Book Award for fiction in 1953.  It’s the story of an African-American man who sees himself as socially invisible, and it talks about the social and intellectual issues African-Americans faced in the early 20th century.

I also have to mention that BN was playing Eric Clapton’s latest album while we were there, which made the whole experience that much more enjoyable.  We had a very nice day and I’m already looking forward to next week.  So until then, happy reading!