Mailbox Monday - April 22, 2013

Time for my favorite meme, Mailbox Monday, hosted in April by MariReads.  

"Mailbox Monday is a gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week and explore great book blogs. Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists. It was started by Marcia, previously of The Printed Page and is now a Blog Tour, hosted by a different book blog each month."

I have a lot of new books on my shelf--I suppose doing so well with my TBR Pile challenge has given me license to acquire books to fill the empty slots.

Waverley, by Sir Walter Scott - I have wanted to read Scott for the longest time--he was one of Austen's favorite authors, and a favorite of so many other of my favorite authors that I really would like to have a personal knowledge of his stories.  The back of my brand-new Penguin Classics copy promises that this is "the first romantic historical novel and international bestseller."  Published in 1814, it will be a nice complement to the Outlander series as it also tells the story of the Jacobite rising in Scotland.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe - this is the May book for Tuesday Book Talk on Goodreads.  I've been a member for a few months but haven't participated in the discussions yet.  Here's part of the blurb on Goodreads and what prompted me to vote for it:

Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie's grandmother's abandoned home near Salem, she can't refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a quest--to find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge.

The Sherlockian, by Graham Moore - time to find out what all the fuss is about. As a long-time reader of Sherlock Holmes stories, this promises to be a fun summer read.  I have a couple of long airline flights in June that I think this will be perfect for.

Chesapeake, by James A. Michener - a fellow blogger mentioned this book on her blog and I remembered that I have been wanting to read it for years.  I absolutely love sprawling millenium-spanning novels about specific places.  I love Edward Rutherford's books, and it's been a long time since I read a Michener.

The Eight, by Katherine Neville - Ryan at Wordsmithonia mentioned this book, and I decided it sounded so interesting that I just had to get it.  Here's the Amazon blurb:

Katherine Neville's debut novel is a postmodern thriller set in 1972 ... and 1790. In the 20th century, Catherine Velis is a computer expert with a flair for music, painting, and chess who, on her way to Algeria at the behest of the accounting firm where she is employed, is invited to take a mysterious moonlighting assignment: recover the pieces of an old chess set missing for centuries.
In the midst of the French Revolution, a young novice discovers that her abbey is the hiding place of a chess set, once owned by the great Charlemagne, which allows those who play it to tap into incredible powers beyond the imagination. She eventually comes into contact with the major historical figures of the day, from Robespierre to Napoleon, each of whom has an agenda.
The Eight is a non-stop ride that recalls the swashbuckling adventures of Indiana Jones as well as the historical puzzles of Umberto Eco which, since its first publication in 1988, has gone on to acquire a substantial cult following.

Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, by Claudia L. Johnson - I recently attended Austen at Altitude, a conference co-sponsered by the two JASNA organizations in Colorado and held in Denver.  Claudia Johnson was the keynote speaker and I was so interested in her talk--on the sublime in Austen--that I wanted to get one of her books for a little lit crit indulgence reading.  The wonderful Tattered Cover bookstore, one of Denver's crown jewels, had a book fair at the Saturday afternoon performance of the Sense and Sensibility, the Musical that was going on during the conference, and so I picked this one up at their table.