Christmas/New Year Book (and Music) Haul (FINALLY!)

I FINALLY MADE IT! *squees without shame*

After a long, long time, I was able to order TEN books from my usual webseller as a birthday/Christmas present for myself. (Well, my parents might have had a, um, marginal role in it...because they were generous as usual, what with Christmas coming and my birthday being on Dec. 14th...You know my job pays shitty, right?).

So, I went online and selected ten books from my TBR list that for some reason I was particularly looking forward to reading, plus four CDs/DVDs by Queen and Billy Joel that I had been dying to get my hands on for quite a long time. They stole half of my books budget (which I had set at 200 euros...), but it's not like I could help it, because 1) music is the only thing I spend my money on besides books, and 2) I had to catch up with them before the artists in question came up with more stuff (which seems to happen every Christmas...). Both Queen and Billy Joel are making a whole lot of their old live music available, so it's dangerous to miss a year of releases. I had skipped Queen's Live at Rainbow (CD & DVD) in 2014, so I was already too far behind...

I suppose you're not particularly interested in my Queen/Joel purchases, but I will mention that - besides Live at Rainbow - I ordered Queen's A Night at the Odeon CD+DVD, and Billy Joel's CD+DVD called A Matter of Time-The Bridge to Russia. The latter will also be a trip down memory lane for me, since it records the legendary BJ's Russian concerts and documentary from 1987, snippets of which I remember avidly watching on MTV at the time, when I was still a relatively new Joel fan (though I had been drawn to his music since I was a young teen, and I had already been following Billy's career for about 5 years back then). I haven't seen any of the stuff anymore for almost 30 years, which makes me feel...um...yes, old, thank you for the cue ;P. What I really meant to say was...emotional?
(BTW...my only complaint is that I'll have to wait till late February in order to get my package delivered...since they say one my my books can't be obtained for at least 6 weeks! Ugh).

Enough of that. I know you want books, books, BOOKS! So here goes the list of those I've just requested, broken down by genres/Reading Rooms...

Christopher Pike Room: Black Knight (Witch World #2, 2014) | Strange Girl (2015)
 

Black Knight - tags: urban fantasy, multiverse, paranormal, sci-fi. The sequel of Red Queen (originally called Witch World; my review here) was out in December 2014. Problem was, I weren't able to place a book order at the time, so I had to wait till now. Witch World/Red Queen isn't one of my favourite Pike novels, so it's not like the suspense was killing me, but - you know, PIKE. And Book 1 was a solid 3.5 star reading for me, after all...Short blurb: in the first installment, the main character Jessie awakens to the discovery that there is a parallel universe in which she is a very powerful witch. The premise may sound overused, but the execution makes up for it, despite a few flaws. The second book introduces a male lead and an arena where the most powerful witches have to battle one another. A bit Hunger-Games-like, but Pike states that it's actually an old idea of his that only found its way to a book recently...
Strange Girl - tags: mystery, paranormal. I've read the first 6 chapters online and it sounds roughly like a YA version of Pike's adult book Sati. I'm curious about the way Pike managed to span a different story from a similar premise.

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Supernatural Room: Beyond: A Ghost Story (2012) by Graham McNamee

A girl threatened by her own shadow, fighting for life with the help of her best (female) friend. Goodreads reviewers tagged this as horror, too. I might have spoiled myself too much already by reading the reviews, but I still want to know how the thing's played...not to mention, it's been a while since I read a straight-up supernatural book.

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Sci-Fi Room: Singing the Dogstar Blues (1998) by Alison Goodman

This was supposed to be a series, but sadly, only a companion short story was written (The Real Thing, in the Firebirds Rising anthology). Alien boy & human girl team, friendship and connection but NO ROMANCE. Yay! Oh, and also...TIME-FRIGGIN'-TRAVEL :))).

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Thriller Room: Burnout (2011) by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

I haven't read a new-to-me thriller or mystery in a long time. It sounds like this one is more on the contemporary side than not, but still a mystery. A former alcohol-addicted girl wakes up in a strange place and attire, missing a whole day of her life. What happened?

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Contemporary Room: This Side of Salvation (2014) by Jeri Smith-Ready

Apart from Christopher Pike, JSR is the only author on this list I'm already familiar with, though via her more mature material (the adult novel Requiem for the Devil and the NA series WVMP Radio - which wasn't tagged as NA back when I read it, or else I could have skipped it haha. But I still think it's more A than NA). So I expect wicked good - and funny - writing. Also, I know how Smith-Ready tackles themes like faith and religion, so I expect to enjoy this one for that reason, too. Teen David loses his brother and sees his parents turn into over-religious zealots. Then, apparently, the Rush happens, and David's parents disappear...Sounds like it's got both a contemporary and a mystery vibe, which is a definite plus!

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Unwalled Room: The Walls Around Us (2015) by Nova Ren Suma | The Dead House (2015) by Dawn Kurtagich | White Space (Dark Passages #1, 2014) & The Dickens Mirror (Dark Passages #2, 2015) by Ilsa Bick

A little explanation here for those of you who are not familiar with my blog (YET. LOL). I set up a so-called Unwalled Room on here for books that are difficult to label. Are they more contemporary? sci-fi? urban fantasy? paranormal? mystery? or a few of these ingredients are more or less equally used and blended together? I firmly believe there are books you can't fit under a single label...this "Room" is for them.
Both The Walls Around Us and The Dead House have caused a bit of a sensation lately (especially the first one - the other got more mixed reviews, but then again, you can't say it went unnoticed). I don't often find myself reading very popular books, not out of snobbery, but because they hardly seem to suit my tastes or have premises that I can buy into. But these two were impossible to resist for me. Welcome paranormal/supernatural mindfuckery! welcome unreliable narrators! welcome mystery! As for the Dark Passages duology, "mixed reviews" doesn't even begin to convey the reception it got. And most readers decided to stop at Book 1, or to even DNF it. But I love ambitious and challenging novels, so no amount of negative reviews succeeded in steering me away from this series. Actually, I plan on reading these books for last when they arrive, precisely because I want to savour them without the lingering awareness that I still have more new books to read after them...Am I making any sense? LOL. I don't want to rush them, that's it.

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Have you read any of these books? or do you plan to? Are you already familiar with any of these authors? or are you going to read any of their books in the future?