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In what is easily my most favorite time of the year, late September/early October is when the books come home to live.

First is the annual Friends of the Library book sale in a nearby town. Even though we got to it shortly after noon on Saturday (less than a day into the sale), they had already transitioned from selling the books individually to selling them for $3 a bag. This year's acquisition:

The Cathedral - Hugh Walpole
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Alas, Babylon - Pat Frank
Lord John and the Private Matter - Diana Gabaldon
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten - Robert Fulghum
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt

Then this weekend was Educator's Discount at Borders. For slightly more than $3:

Hood - Stephen Lawhead
Feast of Fools - Rachel Caine
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman
Tales of H.P. Lovecraft - ed. Joyce Carol Oates
The Dead and the Gone - Susan Beth Pfeffer
The Dangerous Alphabet - Neil Gaiman (for Katie's birthday)
How I Became A Pirate - Melinda Long (for Katie's birthday)

These join the huge pile already occupying my bookshelf. I've already finished Alas, Babylon, with a far different opinion than when I first read it over two decades ago, and have started Hood, a book I could happily spend the rest of the day with exclusively.

Mmmm, books.

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So what was your change of mind regarding "Alas, Babylon"? It's been so long since I read it, my memory of it is blurry.

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The first time I read it, I thought it was brilliant, very frightening, and thought provoking. I can't remember exactly how old I was, but it's entirely possible that the Berlin Wall had yet to come down, which may have played a part in my reponse. This time, although I found it to still be a decent story, I also found the main character's preparations for imminent nuclear war to be largely pathetic; he did almost nothing to get ready, even though he had been given well over a day's notice. This made it hard for me to be sympathetic toward him, since it seems he could have prevented many of the crises in the book simply by rubbing a couple brain cells together.

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I loved 'Hood', and the sequel 'Scarlet'. I'm hanging out for the third one in the series which is called 'Tuck'. I should check out the library catelogue again to see if it's around, not sure when it's due to be published.

I also enjoyed the 'Lord John' novels. I've read all of those to date and apparently there is a new one coming out in November.

Good to hear that Hood is likely to live up to its initial promise.

I'd not read any of the Lord John novels, though I'd read most of the parent series. The first couple books there were good, but IMO the series got substantially worse after Gabaldon rejected her editors. Had the book not been at the library sale, it never would have come into my possession.

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