Incoming Books: July 23rd & 24th

I hit a bookstore yesterday, and both a library and a comic book store today -- if I buy an e-book tomorrow, I'll have officially run the table this weekend. (But I don't expect that will happen.)

Borders sent me another coupon -- for 40% off this time -- so I wandered over to my local on the way home from work to see if they had a copy of Charles Stross's The Fuller Memorandum on hand -- and they did. It's the third "Laundry" files book -- after the highly excellent The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue -- which is my favorite work from one of the very best SF writers working today. So I'll be getting to this one quickly, I hope.

(And I love that cover -- it's so quintessentially Ace, in ways I can't entirely define. The fonts, the placement, the figure -- even with that almost Terry Pratchett-esque spectre of death, that's a deeply Ace-ian cover.)

While I was there, I checked to see if they had the brand-new (released at midnight on Tuesday) Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour -- the finale to the excellent graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O'Malley -- and was happy to note that Borders is still keeping up with their reputation as the stronger chain for manga/graphic novels. I also expect to be reading this really quickly.

At the comics shop, I got a couple of floppies for the boys and a Previews catalog. (For last month, I think, since the new one will be out any minute now.) It's a small store, mostly for undiscriminating young Big Two fans -- there's a sizable section of toys in the back, which I always think pegs the mental age of the customers of a store very well -- so I didn't see any of the books I was half-hoping to find there (Matt Kindt's Revolver and the new B.P.R.D., Jack of Fables, and Ex Machina collections).

And, as usual, I didn't find the one book I thought of looking for at the library -- China Mieville's Kraken, which I'll get on the reserve list for before long -- but I did run into three other books that I already knew I wanted to read. (And all of them were non-fiction, interestingly enough.)

First was Tom Bissell's Extra Lives, a book about video games that's been getting good review attention. (It's pro-games, which is unusual in book form.)

Then I bumped into Lynn Barber's memoir An Education, basis for the movie of the same name (which I saw a couple of months back). I'd almost bought it once or twice in a bookstore, so it was an easy choice to nab at the library.

And last was the new book by retail guru Paco Underhill, What Women Want. I'd liked his first two books -- Why We Buy and Call of the Mall -- which was enough for me to want to see if he had anything new to say this time out.

So, if you're wondering what I'll be reading for the next two weeks or so, add a few graphic novels (it's probably time for a string of manga, actually) to the above, and that's likely to be it.