Consortium of Seven

 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 ...

 Howdy folks!     My apologies for the lateness of today’s entry but I was having having computer and other issues.  But to start with, enjoy these plush pumpkins I found today.  Aren't they adorable? Second in this week's bounty, a nice box set of the Hunger Games paperbacks.   I already had them in various editions, but I'm a sucker for a matched set of things.  And besides, it may be a time for a reread on these; I haven't touched them since the last movie came out and that's almost five years ago now.  (There is apparently a prequel novel out now but hey, I think I'm good when it comes to that. I've been watching the new Star Trek: Lower Decks show on CBS All Access (very funny and not just relying on Trek in-jokes), and I realized that I simply do not own this, the best Trek movie.  So this was a welcome find today so I can relive my childhood of watching Shatner and Montalban snarl at each other for 90+ minutes.  This is rea...

 Welcome back, everyone!  This weeks 5 is an eclectic combination of murder, heroism and (literal) tripe.   So let's get started. Ordinarily, Nora Roberts isn't especially my thing.  I respect the hell out her for her work ethic and her standing up for author rights, but her romance novels just are not my usual deal.  But then a few years ago I discovered that she has this odd little cop series under another name, set in the late 2050's in New York City, and it's almost surprisingly good and touching while also having hardcore cop stuff.  This is book 40 in the series (she is up to 51 as of this month) and the saga of Eve Dallas and her husband Roarke is one I'm so weirdly invested in. As a gamer, I'm a PS4 guy and I also try to be economical about it (seriously, games cost around $60, and for the amount of time you get out of them, that's not a ripoff).  So finding a Madden (the NFL video game franchise from only 2 years ago) for only $2 was a he...

Hello everyone and welcome to my new column here where I weekly highlight anything interesting I might have found in my shopping at thrift stores, estate sales, Little Free Libraries and the like.  Each week I'll highlight five items and talk a bit about why I bought them.