I can’t remember the last time I did a book haul here. Was it after Christmas? In the spring? I don’t know. But I’ve gotten several books over the past few months, so I thought I would share them with you and talk them up.

There was one book I forgot to put in this photo because it was in my work bag and not out in the open where I could see and remember it.

I bought these books at Barnes & Noble, my local indie bookshop, or my local used bookshop.

• The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo
• Floriography: An Illustrated Guide to the Victorian Language of Flowers by Jessica Roux
• Letters on Cézanne by Rainer Maria Rilke
• The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton
• The Nature of Middle-earth by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Carl F. Hostetter
• A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan #2) by Arkady Martine
• The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner
• Legend of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong (series):
• – A Hero Born
• – A Bond Undone
• – A Snake Lies Waiting
• – A Heart Divided

Not pictured:

• The King of Infinite Space by Lyndsay Faye

Most of these purchases came about because I was browsing, and the books looked interesting- like The Lost Apothecary, Floriography or The Book of Tea. I picked up Letters on Cézanne because I love anything by Rilke, who was a melodramatic twentieth-century German poet whose poetry is gorgeous but rather opaque. I rarely find anything of his at the used bookshop that I don’t already own, but I got lucky on a recent trip and found this.

The Nature of Middle-earth was a given. It’s Tolkien, after all. I probably won’t get to it until next year, though, since I’m working my way through The History of Middle-earth books, and won’t get them done until 2022. I bought The Lost Apothecary because I’ve been interested in it since it came out, and Barnes & Noble had it on sale for half off.

I bought The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton (even though I haven’t yet read anything by her…) because she was one of America’s best fiction writers, and it’s not a bad idea to get writing advice from the best. I bought A Desolation Called Peace because I started the first book in the duology, A Memory Called Empire, and while I had to put it aside before I finished it, I was loving it while I was reading it. I’m planning to get to both books this month.

I bought The King of Infinite Space because I love Lyndsay Faye’s writing, and because Hamlet is my favorite Shakespearean play.

And finally, while I rarely buy an entire series in one go, I decided to go ahead and get the entirety of Jin Yong’s Legend of the Condor Heroes, which came out around the same time as The Lord of the Rings, and has sold twice as many copies (about 300,000,000). I’ve read the first book, A Hero Born, and enjoyed it once I got used to the rhythm of the novel, but I lost track of the translations and didn’t continue. I also had thought it was going to be thirteen volumes long, and so I was reluctant to follow yet another extensive fantasy series. But I found out last summer that it’s actually four volumes in total, which is a lot easier to deal with than thirteen. So I’ll be getting back into this series at some point in the near future.