One more book update

I’m not sure yet if this is the last round of B&N freebies; the promotion was supposed to run up through the 14th, so I’m thinking there’ll be at least one more round before they’re done. This one I’m particularly happy about though since it includes King Solomon’s Mines, a novel that’s specifically called out in the Amelia Peabody series by Amelia herself when she describes the adventures her family has. Woo!

Here they are. As you can see they’re all generally famous historical classics and I’m pleased that the Fairy Tales one is in there too.

• Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana
• Sailing Alone Around the World, by Joshua Slocum
• The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It, by Edith Nesbit
• King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard
• Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain
• The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Prince and the Pauper, by Mark Twain
• The Jungle Books, by Rudyard Kipling
• The Arabian Nights
• Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
• Fairy Tales, by Hans Christian Andersen

Meanwhile I have finally bailed on the hiatus! Friday evening, I went to meet solarbird, spazzkat, and jennygriffee for dinner after their day of PAX, and after, since Jenny and I had had a bit of plum wine, we decided to hang out in B&N until Jenny felt okay to drive. “Oh DARN,” we said to each other, “whatever shall we do in a bookstore?”

The answer for me was “buy the latest by mizkit and rachelcaine“! So I walked out with Truthseeker and Total Eclipse, respectively! Had a sharp eye out for seanan_mcguire‘s An Artificial Night, but didn’t see that yet.

Still holding off a bit on buying new ebooks, though. Wanting to make a bit more progress through the Amelias, up to at least The Falcon at the Portal. And probably up until the next paycheck anyway.

Total for the year: 275. It’ll be interesting to review these numbers and see how many of these books were freebies, how many were digital, and how many were print. Possibly also how many were both!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Book Log #59: The Curse of the Pharoahs, by Elizabeth Peters

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After the awesomeness that is Crocodile on the Sandbank, the mighty opening round of the Amelia Peabody series, a reader might wonder how Elizabeth Peters could possibly have packed more awesome into these books. The answer: by the introduction of Amelia and Emerson’s son, the “catastrophically precocious” Walter Peabody Emerson, better known by his nickname of Ramses.

The opening of this book remains one of my favorite bits in the entire series. It’s four years after the events of Book 1, and Amelia and Emerson have been staying at home in England raising their small son rather than risking him by a return to Egypt. In a quick little sequence of anecdotes, Amelia provides a delightful little portrait of exactly what this kid is like, from how he started to talk at a very early age to how he delighted in his father reading grisly accounts of mummies to him, and most of all in digging up bones out of the garden. He’s a bit too twee at this early age, though, as his dialogue is written out with some baby pronunication that makes him a bit hard to read. I was cheerfully willing to overlook that though for the giggle factor of young Ramses interrupting a tea party his mother is having–by bringing Amelia a particularly filthy femur, and horrifying all the other women present. Muaha.

Sadly, Ramses is not actually much in this book. The main gist of the plot involves one Lady Baskerville coming to beg Emerson for assistance, for her husband, himself a well-known excavator, has died in the middle of digging into a new tomb. Lady Baskerville wants Emerson to continue the job–and if at all possible, to investigate the mystery of her husband’s death and other strange circumstances that have surrounded their entire dig. And it’s certainly an entertaining mystery, notable for setting up a lot of the standard elements of an Amelia Peabody book: murder, a budding young romance, and someone (or multiple someones) being attracted passionately to Emerson! One other plot element is introduced here as well that will resonate through several of the following novels: the Emersons’ acqusition of the cat Bastet.

So even though the main plot doesn’t stand out for me as much as with the rest of the series, there are still a whole bunch of important things introduced here that set up books to come. For this one, four stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.