Goodbye 2009, Hello 2010

The hustle and bustle of the holidays are over, the inventory is complete, in another week or two I should have everything completed that I didn’t have time to touch over the past two months. Whew! Soon I will be able to get back to what I love most, reading! Not that I ever stopped completely. I don’t think that’s possible. Reading is like breathing to me. I feel like I haven’t gotten through nearly as many books as I hoped by year’s end, but I have great expectations for this year!

I did manage to complete two young adult novels which did not disappoint. If you are as big a fan of Ellen Hopkins as I am, you probably finished Tricks months ago. What did you think? She never disappoints, does she? She isn’t afraid to tackle the tough subjects and she doesn’t tiptoe around the real issues. Her writing style is brilliant and amazes me with each and every addition. How can I possibly wait until September for the final chapter in the Crank trilogy??

The other new series I discovered is the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Have you read it? Oh, you must!! I couldn’t put it down! I’m looking forward to finding out what happens next with Catching Fire.

Many of our local favorites published new books recently, too. Victoria Houston joined us for her annual visit last month with the tenth, but thankfully not the last, book in the Loon Lake Mystery Series, Dead Renegade. Nelda Johnson Liebig completed the fourth book in the Carrie series, Carrie and the Homestead, and was generous enough to sign a few copies for us. Unfortunately she will be moving on to other adventures so this is the last planned for this series. Torture at the Back Forty is still a best seller and another true crime with local ties, The Monfils Conspiracy has been getting a lot of press.

Lately I have been reading a few intriguing titles to be released next month. Sorry, you will have to wait for my opinions on those.

What about you?

Have you read anything exciting over the holidays or that you are looking forward to now that things have quieted down?

Oh, What a Week!

It started last Saturday with a visit from one of our favorite Wisconsin authors, Victoria Houston . Since the publication of the ninth book in her Loon Lake mystery series was postponed a month, her visit was also postponed. This gave customers a whole extra month to reserve copies. Unfortunately the extra month didn’t help. As a small town bookstore, our orders are based on the number of reserved copies and previous sales. Since this is the third year this particular author visited us, we at least had the previous years’ numbers to go off of. We had an excellent turn out this year which proved to be good news/bad news. We had about half a dozen frustrated customers walk away without a signed copy of Dead Hot Shot – all but one were first time visitors from other towns. This is something we felt absolutely terrible about, which almost overshadowed the feeling of glee at selling twice as many as last year.

This has me concerned about tomorrow’s release of Breaking Dawn. Once again based on last year’s sales of Eclipse and the number of pre-orders, we should have plenty of books for all…I guess we will know soon enough.

Hopefully tonight musician extraordinaire, Skip Jones, brings enough copies of his newest CD, Life is Delicious!