In My Mailbox #20

Uhh, I can't even explain how nice it is to have pink hair again. I had a string of Law-related interviews and they tend to prefer their grad students to be... well, un-pink. But they're done now and it shows how expectant of actually getting any of those placements I am by the fact that I immediately dyed my hair back to it's normal, stupid, colour.

I missed having little girls excitedly inform their parents that they wanted pink hair like me!

And now on to the books, much as I'm sure you all care deeply about my hair colour.

 

This is an awful picture, but I wasn't about to drop the hot water bottle and blanket I was clutching to my chest in order to take a better one.

First off, Ellie from Musings of a Bookshop Girl was nice enough to send me a copy of Anna and the French Kiss, and I was thrilled by how pretty it is! Obviously I'd seen the cover before, but the pages are all old-fashioned and wonky and the cover has an embossed title and... wow. What can I say, Ellie is wonderful. I've said it before and no doubt I'll say it again!  

The books that are helpfully completely obscured by white paper above are library books. I've recently discovered the library's online request system and I may have got a little over-excited.

Not that you can tell, but those are Ill Wind by Rachel Caine and Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes by Melissa Katsoulis.

I'm really excited to read both of these - I've been keeping an eye out for the first book in the Weather Warden series for ages, but Sheffield Library always seemed to have the third, fourth and fifth books, but no others. Sigh. But now I have my grubby little paws on it!

I saw Telling Tales in Waterstones ages ago and thought the idea was fascinating. It was the more obvious hoaxes - like the Shakespeare manuscripts - but also a few of the more obscure ones, and I've always been interested in bookish scandals!

The big black book, The Ring of Solomon, is also a requested library book but the white paper must have fallen out. It's a prequel to the Bartimaeus series by Jonathan Stroud, which I loved years ago.

There's a funny story to The End Specialist. I've had a book on my wishlist for a while called The Postmortal, or something similar, but it never seemed to be available. So I was wandering round Waterstones with my Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket and picked up this book, which I duly purchased. I got home and examined it more closely... and it turns out to be the UK version of The Postmortal! Don't you love it when you accidentally end up knocking a book off your wishlist?

I bought Pride from the bookseller on the market as part of my plan to devour the complete Shifters series in as little time as humanly possible. I read the first book Stray (review here) a few days ago (part of my psychotic library book requesting) and adored it, so I've been frantically trying to gather the other books together. This is the third book, the second is on request from the library, and the fourth is on it's way via a swap. I'm getting there, people!

A massive thank you needs to go out to Eleni at Hodder & Stoughton for being nice enough to send me an ARC of The Killables. It looks like a brilliant dystopian novel and even had a little badge attached to the cover!

Last but not least, An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain: Or Sixty Years of Making the Same Stupid Mistakes as Always by John O'Farrell. I've always been more knowledgeable about older history - the Tudors are 'my' time period. So when this popped up on a request on ReaditSwapit, I couldn't resist the chance to reach out. I think I'll use it for Ellie's Mixing it Up Challenge.

LATER: Oops, it turns out the above book wasn't last or least! After being impressed by the creativeness that went into Rivers of London when I read it last week (review here), I couldn't resist picking up the second one from Waterstones.

The first book had its faults, but I liked it enough regardless to want to see what Moon Over Soho can do. It's currently at my boyfriend's flat because I only had so much room in my bag for books, and unfortunately it was one of the books that got temporarily culled.

So what's in your mailbox this week?