New Booksies

Books are the best. And it's accidentally been almost a month since I last told you of my acquisitions. Blame work and travel and stuff.

Received for review from Exhibit A (Angry Robot's crime imprint), Baen, Cloudburst Books, FableCroft, Tachyon Publications and Strange Chemistry (phew! And yes, in that order):

• The Cambodian Book of the Dead by Tom Vater
• Because it seemed like a good idea and sounds interesting.
• Mars, Inc. by Ben Bova
• I read (well, audiobooked) a bunch of Ben Bova a few years ago and eventually stopped when I got annoyed at the sexism in his books (and still have some un-listened-to audiobooks, alas). I'm willing to give him another try, partly because I think his later books were a bit better than the earlier ones (and if anything I was reading them roughly in reverse publication order) and partly because the cover and blurb caught my eye. (And that's saying something, since Baen usually ruins their perfectly nice cover art with truly hideous typography. If I were judging books by their covers, I would never have read Bujold, and that would have been sad.)
• The Blood of Whisperers by Devin Madson
• First book by a new Australian fantasy author. Japanese flavoured. Have already started reading. Also a new small press to watch.
• Path of Night by Dirk Flinthart
• Aussie author, Sydney cop, monsters and mysterious happenings. What's not to like?
• In the Company of Thieves by Kage Baker
• You know, the blurb does not say that this is a short story collection. I was surprised when I opened it. It's not that I don't want to read Company short stories by Kage Baker, but the blurb got me all excited that it was going to be a posthumous novel they'd unearthed/put together. How does omitting that information on the blurb make sense?! (Yes, it was in the press-release, but really, who reads press-releases?)
• The Almost Girl by Amalie Howard
• Science fiction YA, not enough of that around. Also soldier girl, android wars, sounds promising. 
• Shadowplay by Laura Lam
• The sequel to Pantomime, which was a great book about an intersex main character and who ran away to join a circus (as an acrobat). Really looking forward to finding out more about the world it's set in.

I also bought

• An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield 
• because he seems cool and the excerpt the Guardian ran sold me on the notion. (Also, I'd like to note that this book has the rather long subtitle of What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything)

Yay, books! And a dose of snark.