Stacking the Shelves: Lovely, dark, and signed dancers under the bell jar

Stacking the Shelves is a weekly meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews to showcase all the books we got in the past week. Those can be bought, won, gifted, for review, borrowed, print or ebooks... no matter, just share what you got :)


This is my first StS post since the end of January, so obviously I bought A LOT of books during that time. Listing them up here would be tedious for all of us, so I'm only showing you a small selection. I'm also planning on writing mini-reviews or a quick spotlight on some of the books I've read during my time away from blogging. So today I'm showing you...

The Classics

 The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

Les Fleurs du Mal, by Charles Baudelaire

Richard II, by William Shakespeare

The Tempest, by William Shakespeare

Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard

I picked up the Shakespeares and Arcadia from used books stores in New Orleans and San Francisco. I'm especially happy that I found Arcadia - my only copy was in my Norton Anthology of Literature, which weighs a ton and makes for a bothersome re-read. It's my favorite play (yes, I like it more than Shakespeare) and it's not that easy to get a hold of, unless you want to pay upwards of 40 bucks for a whole collection of Stoppard's plays.

I've also wanted to read Les Fleurs du Mal for a very long time, but I'm always a bit wary of translations, especially when it comes to poetry. This edition has the French original and the English translation side by side, which is awesome because I know French, but not well enough to read Baudelaire without a crutch. I bought this edition and The Bell Jar at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco (they have a whole room just for poetry!) which was a special thing for me to do. I've wanted to go there ever since I first heard about it in class when we discussed the Beat poets. It's a wonderful place, and it made me wish I'd grown up in that city. Or maybe I'm just a bit morose because I finished The Bell Jar a few hours ago and it really left an impression on me. I wish I had already read when I was 18 or 19.

The Long-Awaited

 The Lovely and the Lost, by Page Morgan

Dancers at the End of Time, by Michael Morcock

Technically, only The Lovely and the Lost was long-awaited. I was writing my thesis when it came out so the release kind of went past me. I really loved The Beautiful and the Cursed though, so I hope I can read it soon.
I read a lot about Moorcock while I was writing my thesis (about Steampunk and it's 19th-century precursors) but I didn't feature any of his work in my thesis, so I was really happy to find this one at a bookstore in Amsterdam last Saturday! It contains three of his novels and it's all inspired by the fin-de-siècle and Wilde and the decadent movement ^^

The ARCs

The Darkest Part of the Forest, by Holly Black

Mortal Heart, by Robin LaFevers

I got both of these at ALA in Vegas and you can imagine my amount of inner (okay, and some outer) squeeee :D I've already read Darkest Part of the Forest and loved it! It's also signed ^^

I also got two ARCs from Edelweiss:

The Fall, by Bethany Griffin
The Cemetery Boys, by Heather Brewer
I've featured The Fall as this week's WoW post, and I'm very excited to finally have the opportunity to read something by Heather Brewer! This one is a standalone, so it's perfect. She also has two series, but somehow the number of books always daunted me a bit.

The Graphic Novels

The Good Neighbors series, by Holly Black

Coffin Hill: Forest of the Night, by Caitlin Kitteredge

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by Alan Moore

The picture only shows book 2 and 3 of the Good Neighbors, but I have them all, and they're all signed :D I got them at Book of Wonders in New York. They had so many signed books! And that was before I actually met Holly Black, and I already thought things couldn't get better.

Coffin Hill was a spontaneous purchase at a comic store in the Castro district in San Francisco. I've heard about Kitteredge's other books, and the artwork looked cool. Also, I wanted something to remember the store by. As for the Extraordinary Gentlemen, I've wanted to read that one for a long time, so I had to have it.

The Signed

The Book of Life, by Deborah Harkness

Game, by Barry Lyga

The Shadow Society, by Marie Rutkoski

At this point, I need to thank Kelly from Effortlessly Reading again! She gifted me Game and The Shadow Society. Gifted! Signed books! Just like that o.O I was flabbergasted. And very, very happy! I'll tell you all about my Amsterdam trip to Deborah Harkness tomorrow, so I didn't take a picture of her signature, but here are the others:

The "Disturb the Universe" note makes me happy, because it's an important part of the book and also one of my favorite sections from my favorite poem ^^


Alright, that's it! Any comments on my haul? Does anyone even bother to read my accounts of how I got into possession of the books? Anyhow, I'm curious to see your own new shelf-pretties, so link me up :)