Closing January Library Visit

Man, oh man how I love the library.  Isn’t the library great?  I couldn’t imagine a world without libraries, and am always stunned when one is close to shutting down.  It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me when they do.  Well, I guess bureaucratic mess is mostly to blame.  Anyway, I’m getting off track.  The point is that Thursday I moseyed on down to the library to look for something to read–even though I have 1,001 unread books on my shelves.  And because I stay in there and scanning shelf after shelf for new discoveries, here’s what I found… 

Long Distance Love by Marita Golden

"A woman flees the South of the 1920's to join the Black migration Northward, marries a black rationalist and has a daughter, who returns to the South to fight for civil rights and find her own identity"

Flight of the Blackbird by Faye McDonald Smith

"Members of the Black professional elite in Atlanta, Mel and Builder Burke work hard and enjoy the benefits of private school for their daughter and two vacations a year, but their dream begins to fade when Mel loses her job and Builder's business crumbles."

James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories

In the past I tried to buy this Baldwin collection a total number of three times!  And each time something happened where I ended up having to get my money back.  Grrrr.  So while I checked this copy out from my library visit, I ended up ordering my own copy off Amazon the following day (which I should've done in the first place).  

I really, really wanted this book for myself (and the following two collections).  I've already read Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room.  For the other two novels featured in this collection, I held out for my own copy of this book.  There is this excitement in me that I can't put into words right now.

Foreigner by C. J. Cherryh

"It had been nearly five centuries since the starship Phoenix, lost in space and desperately searching for the nearest G5 star, had encountered the planet of the atevi. On this alien world, law was kept by the use of registered assassination, alliances were defined by individual loyalties not geographical borders, and war became inevitable once humans and one faction of atevi established a working relationship. It was a war that humans had no chance of winning on this planet so many light-years from home. 

Now, nearly two hundred years after that conflict, humanity has traded its advanced technology for peace and an island refuge that no atevi will ever visit. Then the sole human the treaty allows into atevi society is marked for an assassin's bullet. The work of an isolated lunatic? The interests of a particular faction? Or the consequence of one human's fondness for a species which has fourteen words for betrayal and not a single word for love?"

So for those following me as of late know I've caught a fantasy novel fever.  This book (which is actually sci-fi) was recommended to me by a viewer.  I happened upon it at the library and dashed for it.

And, of course, strawberry cheesecake from Publix.  One MUST have cheesecake when it comes to settling in for some fantastic reading.