Showcase Sunday #17

Showcase Sunday is a weekly meme hosted by Vicki at Books, Biscuits and Tea. Its aim is to showcase our newest books or book related swag and to see what everyone else received for review, borrowed from libraries, bought in bookshops and downloaded onto eReaders this week.

All in all, August was a fairly light month of book acquisitions. And of these eight books, I've actually already read three of them. Progress!

Received:

Courted by Katherine Longshore

I won a copy of the bind-up of Longshore's Tudor novels Gilt and Tarnish through a giveaway hosted by Jen @ The Starry-Eyed Revue in conjunction with Penguin (or should I now be calling it Penguin Random House?). So thanks to both of you for this! I absolutely adore everything about Tudor England and have heard only positive things about Longshore's works.

I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai & Christina Lamb

My university is reading this book as part of a common-reading program developed to encourage reading and widespread community engagement. I volunteered to be a discussion facilitator and so received a copy of this book. It's not my normal reading fare, but it actually was fairly interesting and certainly about important current events. Malala is so inspirational.

Purchased:

Stolen Songbird (Malediction Trilogy, #1) by Danielle L. Jensen

My understanding is that this is a sort of "Beauty and the Beast" retelling with trolls. Honestly, I need to hear no more. But I have seen that it's received fairly high praise overall. With the demise of Strange Chemistry, I'm not sure what the author's plans are for the publication of the remaining books in this trilogy, but hopefully people reading and discussing it will help the trilogy's chances of being continued.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

I like supporting all things local - and here it's two birds with one stone, as I bought at my local indie and am supporting a local author. I missed both her signings of this earlier in the year, unfortunately, but now that I know she lives in the area, I will make an extra effort to find events she's doing. Also, I've heard nothing but high praise for this, so looking forward to reading it!

Middlemarch by George Eliot

I desperately want to read more classics, but it's hard to find the means to convince myself to do so, with so many enticing new releases, most of which read much faster than the typical classic. I'm probably not going to get to this monster of a book for a while, but I will, eventually. I love nineteenth-century British literature. I had many college classes that touched on this time period, but somehow we always skipped over Eliot. Obviously I need to remedy that.

Obsidian (Lux, #1) by Jennifer L. Armentrout

Jennifer L. Armentrout seems to be a pretty big name in the YA paranormal genre (and her pseudonym J. Lynn seems to also be doing pretty well in the NA contemporary genre). But, really, I have no desire to read anything by her; she just doesn't sound like she writes the types of books I'd enjoy. When I found the Kindle edition for Obsidian for free, however, I decided that maybe I will give her a try, just to make sure.

Borrowed:

Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguro

This was my pick for my final work book club meeting, since I ended my job this past month. I'd heard that this was a fantastic discussion book, but not much more. I think it really is thought-provoking, but it's also one of those books you should try to go into knowing as little information as possible. My review.

Throne of Glass (Throne of Glass, #1) by Sarah J. Maas

Oh, Throne of Glass. I wanted to love you, but I expected that I probably wouldn't, given the nature of the criticisms out there on this book. And that's exactly what happened, unfortunately. But I'm not giving up on this series just yet, as I've also heard it gets better and better. And today I'm actually meeting Maas herself, so a second chance is definitely happening.

What books have you acquired recently?