The other day when I sent a short piece off to a chapter newsletter, I added this as a bio clip:
Kay Hudson continues to amass books of all descriptions on her book shelves and her Kindle, and continues to wonder when she’ll have time to read them all. Meanwhile she blogs about buying, reading and writing books at kayhudson.com.
I do blog about other things, cats and cameras and that kitchen sink someone left on my driveway last year (wish I’d had a camera that day), but I keep coming back to books. And I keep buying more of them.
I have a stack of them here on the table, new ones I haven’t found a spot for on the To Be Read shelves yet. Two weekends ago I stopped at Half-Price Books. Something had reminded me of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Doolittle books, which I loved as a child, and I popped into the children’s section to look. No Lofting back there, but on my return to the front of the store I managed to buy four books: A novel by Jennifer Weiner (Good in Bed), two of the Pern books written jointly by Anne McCaffrey and Todd McCaffrey (Dragon’s Fire and Dragon Harper), and a 1984 paperback printing of Anne McCaffrey’s early novel Restoree, which wasn’t there the last time I looked. How could anyone who writes romance and grew up on science fiction resist a cover blurb like this: In another body on another world, Sara risked her life for a man of power and for an alien dream!
I stayed out of bookstores for the next week or two, but that didn’t stop me from placing an order with the Science Fiction Book Club: Third Grave Dead Ahead, the latest from 2009 Romance Writers of America® Golden Heart® winner Darynda Jones (I recently finished First Grave on the Right, Darynda’s GH winner, and I have Second Grave on the Left on the Read Soon stack; Fourth Grave is due in the fall); Naomi Novik’s Crucible of Gold, the latest in her Temeraire series, a reading experience that deserves a report of its own; and, because they were offering a third book for $2, Dragonheart, by Todd McCaffrey.
Meanwhile, on my Kindle, I added Ghosty Men, the story of the Collyer Brothers, New York City’s most famous hoarders, by Franz Lidz. That one was one of Amazon’s daily specials, which I succumb to every couple of weeks. I also bought Finding Her Son, by Robin Perini, seven time Golden Heart finalist and 2011 GH winner. And then one day after the fourth or fifth time I’d seen the trailer for the film John Carter (which, sadly, isn’t getting very good reviews, and shouldn’t they have shoehorned “of Mars” into the title?), I got to thinking about all the Edgar Rice Burroughs adventures I enjoyed long ago. All of them are now long in the public domain, and available in multiple (and therefore confusing) Kindle editions. I never did download the Barsoom stories (one of these days), but I could not resist my favorite of Burroughs’ tales, The Land That Time Forgot, all three of the short novels in one edition. This is a truly insane story of evolution in action from one end of a lost island to the other, with, if I recall correctly, a German WWI era U-boat thrown in for good measure (and extra villains). I’m looking forward to revisiting that one.
This past Saturday, after the West Houston RWA meeting, a group of us went to lunch and to a booksigning at Barnes & Noble, where I bought Austentatious, a new book by fellow Houston Bay Area RWA member Alyssa Goodnight. While I was there I also snagged Death, Taxes, and a Skinny No-Whip Latte, by Diane Kelly, who also was a Golden Heart winner in 2009. This is her second book; the third will be out later this year.
I’m going to put all these books on the shelf and try to behave for a while, really I am. No book buying this weekend. I’ll be back soon with a “recently read” report–if I can stay awake.
Kay Hudson 