Early April Book Porn

Here are the books that I have bought or received as review copies the past week or so.  Later this week, I'll likely post books that I'll buy later today or tomorrow from McKay's.  First up are two books by Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, La casa verde and El hablador.  I am currently doing a biweekly reading/review project of most of Vargas Llosa's literary output over at Gogol's Overcoat, with the first piece to be posted by tomorrow afternoon (got delayed by the trip to Shiloh/Pittsburg Landing).

Next is another Vargas Llosa book, Historia de Mayta and A.M. Dellamonica's Blue Magic, the sequel to the Sunburst Award-winning Indigo Springs.  Might need to track that book down before reading this one.

I am a fan of Evenson's original fiction and after knowing some of the premise behind the genesis of Immobility, I will be reading this in the very near future.  I had chosen Leah Bobet's "Six" for consideration for the aborted Best American Fantasy 4 anthology, so I bought her debut novel, the YAish Above, when it came out last week.  I had mixed reactions to it.  Most of the themes were good, but there was something off about the first-person narrative "voice" that dampened my enjoyment to some extent.  Still, it was promising enough that I will explore future books by her.

I received the Hartwell and Weisman-edited The Sword & Sorcery ARC copy on Monday.  I will try to dip into it in the coming weeks.  Matthew Stover's fourth volume in his ongoing The Acts of Caine series, Caine's Law, arrived yesterday.  I am three-fourths through this and it has surprised me in some ways, most of them pleasantly.  I typically don't enjoy violent stories that much these days, but Stover's novels contain more than just graphic violence for the sake of graphic violence.  Once my backlog of reviews is eased somewhat, I may review this within the next month or so.

Picked up four bound books and a chapbook (not pictured) during my recent trip to the Shiloh National Military Park in Pittsburg Landing, TN.  The first two are Robert E. Lee's Lighter Side:  The Marble Man's Sense of Humor, edited by Thomas Forehand, Jr. and Ronald N. Satz's Tennessee's Indian Peoples:  From White Contact to Removal, 1540-1840.  I read the Satz on the way back from Shiloh and it was an enjoyable, informative read.

Although there were plenty of Civil War history books on display at the Shiloh bookstore, I found myself gravitating to the volumes related to the so-called "Civilized Tribes" (I have a significant amount of Cherokee and Chickasaw ancestry on both sides of my family), so I went with Vicki Rozema's Voices from the Trail of Tears, which collects accounts of those who traveled that forced march out of Tennessee and other southeastern states, and Patrick Minges' Black Indian Slave Narratives, dealing with the African Americans who were the enslaved servants of several of these tribes.  Hope to read these later in the month.

Any of these titles attract your attention?