The institution of austerity measures to try to pay down debt doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the acquisition of new books in this house. They just continue to pile up. Sometimes it actually starts to feel frustrating, especially at a time when I’m reading books solely for review – and those books aren’t grabbing me. I have all these other great books to read waiting for me, and yet I can’t just put down something that isn’t engrossing – not only because I need to finish the books to review them fairly, but also because I just plain have trouble setting down a book I’ve started, even a bad one. (Which makes it all the more puzzling that, despite three tries, I’ve yet to finish Moby-Dick!)

Still, it makes me happy to have reached the end of the month and find that I’ve got a whole pile of wonderful new books just waiting for my attention.

I received these two book to read for review from SFRevu, and I suspect both will catch my attention, and hard. In fact, I’ve started Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, and I know it’s going to be a happy-making book. The Ghosts of Blood and Innocence: The Third Book of the Wraeththu Histories is, I learned too late, the third book of a trilogy, and actually it’s the second of two trilogies. I want to read the other five books before I launch into this one, which means that I have a lot of reading to do by Storm Constantine during August.

Tor sent me a few things this month, and this time they were right on the money with predicting books I’ve been salivating for. I’ve been meaning to get to Mike Carey’s series for some time, so I’m looking forward to Vicious Circle and Dead Men's Boots. (I have The Devil You Know tucked away from a prior month; must start at the beginning, you know!) The Price of Spring is the fourth book in Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet; I enjoyed the first very much, as my review on The Agony Column showed, and I’m looking forward to reading the next three all in one gulp.

In each of the last couple of years, I’ve taken advantage of Night Shade Books’ half-price sale, often buying books that aren’t published yet. This month I received one book that I ordered a year ago, as well as one book I ordered this year. In addition, Night Shade was kind enough to send me Paolo Pacigalupi’s first novel, The Windup Girl, for review. Once again, I’m salivating to start reading all three of these (though I’d need to go to the first of Liz Williams’s Inspector Chen novels and begin at the beginning; this seems to be an issue with an awful lot of the books I’m talking about this month!).

I’ve been attending a class at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco the past several weeks, twice a week: it’s about headaches and how to avoid them. If I can figure out how to stop missing a couple of days each month to suffering, I’ll be able to read a lot more! Having weaned myself off Extra-Strength Tylenol already seems to be helping, as I’m not getting daily bounce-back headaches. (Who would have thought that taking a pain pill like Tylenol can actually cause headaches?) I heartily recommend Kaiser’s pain management program to all and sundry. But the actual point here (and yes, I’m getting to it) is that the classes are in a building that is only a block and a half from Green Apple Books, one of the best bookstores in San Francisco. My July trip to the store netted the books shown immediately above. I’m particularly interested in Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction) (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction), fan as I am of anything that has the least whiff of Jorge Luis Borges. I wish I knew Spanish so that I could read Borges in the original. I must remember to recommend him to my niece, Amanda, who is presently teaching English as a Second Language to children in Chile.

I was surprised and delighted to receive a package jammed with books from Dark Regions Press, a small press that had previously escaped my notice. These six books of horror and fantasy look to be exciting and frightening, and I’m looking forward to diving in. (Dark Entities by David Dunwoody isn’t shown, as I can’t find a cover online.)

Amazon helped me fill in a couple of gaps in my Abraham and Constantine collections.

I finally got around to subscribing to Electric Velocipede, which I recommend to all of you. I took advantage of a deal they had that netted me a copy of Circus of the Grand Design as well as a number of chapbooks. Talk about a great deal! The book otherwise sells for $35. Color me happy.

I have a nagging feeling that there were even more books sneaking into this house during July. Maybe it’s just that there are a few books in my ABE Books basket, some tickling my fancy in signed first editions at “M” Is For Mystery in San Mateo, and that incredibly long wishlist on Amazon. In any event, I never lack for good reading. Isn’t that just about everything I could want from life, so long as I have my husband to read with me? Sometimes I feel like the luckiest woman on earth.