Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Welcome to Thursday, everyone.  Time to see what random nonsense I picked up at thrift stores, resale shops and Little Free Libraries this week.  

Laurell K. Hamilton is a nice author from Missouri who generally writes a lot of urban vampire and shapeshifter novels set in the St. Louis area, but I'm more a fan of these, the Merry Gentry novels.  They're set in a world where the Seelie and the Unseelie Courts have always been visible to humanity and they were essentially expelled from Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, taking refuge under the Thomas Jefferson administration in the serpent mounts of Missouri as long as they kept fairly quiet.  But now Merry, who is both Unseelie and Brownie, is starting to wake up the old magic and that opens a whole raft of political troubles in the fairy and the human worlds.

Also, there's a lot of sex.  Like, Damn.

I'm an absolute sucker for exploration stories, and one of the weird joys of Hidden Figures is how is came out within a few weeks of Moana.  Two excellent movies about the best explorers in human history, one of them about seafaring and magic, one of them about science and rockets, and both of them about strong and smart women using the stars to explore.  This movie is a damn beauty of a piece of work about how we are an exploring species and about how we have cheated some people out of that.

Really, do I need to explain my love for Black Panther?

Station Eleven is one of my favorite science-fiction novels of the last decade (and I am hoping the upcoming HBO Max miniseries is good), so this was a pleasant Little Free Library find.  It is her first novel in 6 years and I can't wait to see if it is any good.

I can't remember the last time I watched The Simpsons, but will always talk about my love of Tony and that voice performance by Joe Mantegna.  So finding his Playmate figure, sadly with only the bat accessory, was a good thing.  And now, I just want to know where the pretzel money is.