I buy books almost every week.

And given that I work at Barnes & Noble, it’s easy to talk myself into it! Here’s more or less how that conversation with self usually goes…

“Self…do you really need this book? Of course not. It’s a fiction novel. You WILL die if you don’t eat, sleep, or work to make money. But you certainly shan’t die from lack of books. Now, maybe you’d be a little sad or feel a bit deprived of life without them, but you surely wouldn’t die.”

 

This is usually the point where I remember the multiple times that a good book has lifted me from depression. Thus, the conversation starts up again…

“Then again, maybe books aren’t a need per say, but feeling good about yourself keeps you going another day. And if books make me happy, surely I’d be doing those around me a favor as well. After all, the happier I am, the less miserable I will make others, right??”

 

At this point, I conveniently remember that as an employee, I have a %30 discount on ALL books…

“I won’t even be spending that much! I have a huge discount to apply to this purchase…and I not even buying all the books I saw. I’m only going to buy the one or two I absolutely fell in love with!”

 

Sigh.

 

Anyway, now that you are more familiar with my split personality ( in that I apparently talk to myself ), I’d love to show you my latest book acquisitions!

 It’s 1950, and as the French Quarter of New Orleans simmers with secrets, seventeen-year-old Josie Moraine is silently stirring a pot of her own. Known among locals as the daughter of a brothel prostitute, Josie wants more out of life than the Big Easy has to offer.

She devises a plan get out, but a mysterious death in the Quarter leaves Josie tangled in an investigation that will challenge her allegiance to her mother, her conscience, and Willie Woodley, the brusque madam on Conti Street.Josie is caught between the dream of an elite college and a clandestine underworld. New Orleans lures her in her quest for truth, dangling temptation at every turn, and escalating to the ultimate test.

-Goodreads bio

 

 

Workaholic attorney Samantha Sweeting has just done the unthinkable. She’s made a mistake so huge, it’ll wreck any chance of a partnership.

Going into utter meltdown, she walks out of her London office, gets on a train, and ends up in the middle of nowhere. Asking for directions at a big, beautiful house, she’s mistaken for an interviewee and finds herself being offered a job as housekeeper. Her employers have no idea they’ve hired a lawyer–and Samantha has no idea how to work the oven. She can’t sew on a button, bake a potato, or get the #@%# ironing board to open. How she takes a deep breath and begins to cope–and finds love–is a story as delicious as the bread she learns to bake.

But will her old life ever catch up with her? And if it does…will she want it back?

–Goodreads bio

 

Rose Baker seals men’s fates. With a few strokes of the keys that sit before her, she can send a person away for life in prison. A typist in a New York City Police Department precinct, Rose is like a high priestess. Confessions are her job. It is 1923, and while she may hear every detail about shootings, knifings, and murders, as soon as she leaves the interrogation room she is once again the weaker sex, best suited for filing and making coffee… prudish Rose is stuck in the fading light of yesteryear, searching for the nurturing companionship that eluded her childhood. When glamorous Odalie, a new girl, joins the typing pool, despite her best intentions Rose falls under Odalie’s spell… And soon her fascination with Odalie turns into an obsession from which she may never recover.

-Goodreads bio

 

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.

Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

-Goodreads bio

 

 

The Other Typist is the only one that’s still only an ARC copy, which I acquired since they give free ARC copies of books to us employees fairly often.  But the rest are very much already out at any bookstore!

Which one would you like to read? 😀