Saturday, May 19, 2012

*Won!* for My Shelf














A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin


That's right.  I won this bad boy.  I haven't started it yet because I've only just finished A Feast for Crows and want to take my time.  After all, A Feast for Crows came out in 2005 and this nugget of gold wasn't released until just last year.  Add to that the two other books Martin is working on and a bookseller has plenty of time on her hands, ya know?  But how did I win such an awesome book in all it's hardcover glory, you may ask?  If you're a regular on this blog, you may remember the Book Club books I included here every month during 2011.  The host of the club, know to the online world as Calico Reaction (I knew her in graduate school), awarded points during the course of the year for reading, participation, etc.  Those with the highest point totals won books.  I managed to come in at second place and won myself a choice of a hardcover book.

It took me a while to decide because I'm a very, very picky book buyer.  If I see something, I'll try to get it at the library first.  If I buy it, it's because I know I'll read it over and over again.  Hardcovers are particularly rare in my collection.  A book has to strike me in just the right way in order for me to want to buy it in that format.  So far, if you don't include hardcovers that were only avaialble in that format (like the Intellectual Devotionals), books that have made it to my shelf include the Harry Potter series, extremely fancy (re: expensive) copies of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and both of Michio Kaku's books - Physics of the Future and Physics of the Impossible.

So finally after asking about 6 of my fellow booksellers for ideas (and none of you were much help by the way, haha), I finally settled with this book because it does look pretty awesome in hardcover and let's face it, while hauling around a giant tome is kind of annoying, trying to read a book this fat in mass market form is worrisome because trying to keep it open enough to read means paranoia about breaking the spine.

I very much look forward to opening this up and thank Calico Reaction for her generosity in prizes (because honestly, even on sale, this book is by no means cheap - at least not to me anyway).  To the rest of you I say head on over to her blog and see what she's got to offer.  Her book reviews are excellent - as are the occasional movie/TV mentions - and she's also got another book club going on so if you're looking for something good to read and this little blog o'mine isn't doing it for you, dive in over there and see what strikes your fancy!

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