I hope you all had a great weekend. Ours was filled with a lot of rain and I’m guessing a lot of people had cabin fever because when we went to Barnes & Noble on Sunday afternoon it was packed. Had a hard time finding a place to sit although it does make me happy to see so many people hanging out at the bookstore.

Anyway, I have received a few interesting Advance Reader Copies and all of a sudden I’ve been requesting a lot of books on NetGalley. I think I kind of got hooked around the time we went on vacation. So this post is to show you some of the new books that have arrived at my door and. I will also tell you about the eGalleys but I am going to save those for a separate post.

Zagreb Noir. The Noir series published by Akashic Books takes the reader further into Easter Europe. From the back cover: In Zagreb, there is a meeting of a continental optimism and a Mediterranean relativism, and this is why the city has never found its peace. I can’t think of any books that I’ve read by Croatian writers so I’m really looking forward to this.

Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper by David Barnett. This is a fantastical steampunk adventure that takes place in nineteenth century Britain. I think this may be part of a series but given that I don’t read many steampunk books I think it would ok to read this as a standalone.

The Drowning Lesson by Jane Shemilt. The Jordan family thought they would return from their gap year abroad enriched, better people, a closer family. Not minus one child. Oh this sounds like a good suspense novel.

So have you read any of these? Which one would you start with if you had these books?

In some of my current reads I have found a couple of passages that I really liked and wanted to share those with you.

“I was seven years old when we came here. I’ve come to think that there’s an age beyond which it is impossible to life a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away. I arrived here just before that age.” From The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi.

I think I found this especially moving because I was seven years old when I moved to the U.S. so I kind of found this very personal.

“If more bookshop owners had taken the responsibility to hang warning signs, her life would have been much easier. Cigarette packets came with warnings, so why not tragic books? There was wording on bottles of beer warning against drinking and driving, but not a single word about the consequences of reading books without tissues at hand.” From The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald.