At some point soon I'm going to have to try and do another count of how many books I've purchased this year. My 2008 total was 54 books and I have the feeling I'm already closing in on that number this year. Hopefully I can increase my amount of reading this year to keep up.

Recent purchases:

• The first two books of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. (HBO has turned these books into an HBO Series. It's outstanding, by the way. So, the birdie wanted to start reading them, so I bought her the first two.)


• The Turning Tide the third Crosspointe novel by Diana Pharaoh Francis.


• Midwinter by Matthew Sturges

As usual I'm reading a few different books, bouncing back and forth between them. At the moment, since I felt like something different than the usual Epic Fantasy, I've dived into Staying Dead, Book 1 of Laura Anne Gilman's Retrievers series. I've been meaning to make the Urban Fantasy plunge for a while and chose this as the book to start with. I'm 70 pages in (MMS version) and am enjoying it. Gilman is doling out little bits of information about her version of NYC in such a way that you have to keep reading to see what's really going on.

I can tell already, I'm going to really enjoy this series. Lucky for me I have the first 3 books in MMS format. And her newest Retrievers book (Book 6) Blood From Stone just came out the other day.