My Cup Floweth Over

Boy, when it rains, it pours.

A check at the bookstores over the past two weeks have netted me some great finds. Unfortunately, this has kind of overwhelmed my bookshelves again after I had made some significant in-roads on my to-read pile. For example, at Fully-Booked, I managed to get some rather hard-to-find books:

• Chaz Brenchley, The Tower of the King's Daughter (The 1st book of The Outremer)
• Cordwainer Smith, Rediscovery of Man (part of the Millennium SF Masterworks)
• Michael Moorcock, The Dancers at the End of Time (part of the Millennium SF Masterworks)

I so love the variety of speculative fiction where you can spin like a coin the 3rd Crusade's Outremer-- that strip of land fortified by Western Christian knights against Muslim defenders of the Holy Land-- and see what turns up.

At the second-hand bookshop Books for Less, they had a plethora of used paperbacks including:

• Richard Grant, A Rumor of Spring
• Elizabeth Hand, Glimmering
• Michelle West, The Sun Sword (6th and concluding book of The Sun Sword series)
• Sheri Tepper, A Plague of Angels
• Gene Wolfe, Free Live Free
• Michael Stackpole, Talion Revenant
• Michael Moorcock, The Dream-thief's Daughter

Richard Grant is the husband of Elizabeth Hand, one of the best prose stylists in speculative fiction today, so I just had to find out if Grant writes as well as his wife. Likewise, Moorcock's book-- a hardbound copy-- is one of the last Elric of Melnibone stories he's writing before he concludes it.

Lastly, at the neighborhood-friendly Booktopia, an order came in as well as some new books. Of course, how could I resist these:

• Patrick o'Leary, The Gift
• Kristen Bishop, The Etched City
• Stephan Dedman, The Art of Arrow Cutting

Great picks, especially Dedman's hard-boiled-noir-meets-Japanese-mythology tale. I also plan to pick-up my favorite author Graham Joyce's The Tooth Fairy and Dark Sister on my next visit as well as whatever catches my eye.

No, I don't have a book problem. What makes you say that?