The Last Ten Books I Couldn't Resist Buying

I'm a book buyer with an unusual amount of self-control. I rarely buy books...

But I heard Abraham Verghese speak about his new book, The Covenant of Water, and off I went to buy it. Independent bookshop + new + a little postage = $40. I'm taking this book slowly, and I'm only a couple of chapters in. It's a perfect Big Book for the summer, I think.

And then I saw Cutting for Stone, Verghese's earlier novel, was a $1.99 Kindle book. Verghese struck me as a very wise man, and I've only previously read his nonfiction, so I bought this one, too.

Did I tell you that we are going to Italy this fall, doing a mini-Stanley Tucci Italian food tour? I spent a lot of time browsing through Let's Eat France last year, so I felt like I needed to buy Let's Eat Italy. Research for the trip.

One of the regions we will be visiting in the fall is Puglia, so The Puglian Cookbook at $1.99 seemed to be a must-buy.

My new Galveston friends and I have formed a summer writing group. Our goal for each of us is to write a Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Novel over the course of the summer. We were originally inspired by the writing practice of Natalie Goldberg, so I felt like I had to buy a $1.99 Kindle copy of Goldberg's Wild Mind. 

The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing is the book one of our writing group suggested we use for our summer writing project. And, of course, I had to buy the workbook that accompanies the book. Still, both of these, one used and one a Kindle book, were less than $15.

The Wishing Game was an impulse buy through the Book of the Month Club. My credits were accumulating, and it sounds ideal for a summer read.

My last two buys were both huge $2.99 Kindle books: Life: A User's Manual and The Gulag Archipelago. Life is described by the Boston Globe as "one of the great novels of the century...on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov," and Time calls The Gulag Archipelago "the best nonfiction book of the 20th century." Life is almost 500 pages and Gulag is over 700, so these are both perfect Kindle books.

What have you bought recently?

Have you had Buyers' Regret?

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Each Tuesday That Artsy Reader Girl assigns a topic and then post her top ten list that fits that topic. You’re more than welcome to join her and create your own top ten (or 2, 5, 20, etc.) list as well. Feel free to put a unique spin on the topic to make it work for you! Please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own post so that others know where to find more information.