The Books at BnN

For Christmas one of my bosses gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card. That's an excellent gift to give someone who is a compulsive book hoarder, and today I finally decided to take the bus up to my nearest store and pick something up. Since I get enough non-fiction from the university library and through my myriad courses, I went straight to the Sci-fi/Fantasy section, hoping to find some additions to my reading bread and butter. The only stipulation that I gave myself was that I didn't want to choose any books from a well known name like Salvatore, Lovecraft, etc, since I could easily find those books in the library, and besides, us small timers have to stick together.

The only problem was that I could find no titles that caught my eye. Every book looked like every other book. Every cover seemed to say the same thing. I ended up prowling the four shelves that made up Barnes and Noble's speculative fiction section a dozen times with no results. Every book was either all about sexy demons in a dirty city, a fantastic medieval world + magic, or a mundie going about his life and suddenly falling into one of the two. The only books that were consistantly drawing my eye were the Warhammer titles. I've yet to read anything from the Warhammer universe, but again and again I would see the cover, or read the back, and think to myself 'oh, this is different', and then notice the Warhammer icon. I had grouped well known series' into the well known authors catagory however, so purchasing a Warhammer book was a no-no for this particular excercise. And that left me with almost nothing.

Luckily I had scribbled down the name of a title Bantam Dell had been trumpeting in my inbox, and upon bringing it up to the help desk found a single copy of the first book of the series hidden at the bottom of the shelves, Scar Night by Alan Campbell. The back cover was torn in two places, but I was out of options, and this was one of the few books that did not bore me within the first three words of the synopsis. Because one paperback did not nearly cover the total of my gift card, I went back to scrounging and eventually settled on A Magic of Twilight by S. L. Farrel, mainly because the words 'relative newcomer' were printed on the back of the book and the cover illustration was not some random person posing with a big weapons in fancy armor.

I've read the first chapter or so of Campbell and it looks promising. Haven't even opened Farrel yet.