A small orgy of personal book buying

I rarely buy new books. I get about 80% of the books I read from the library (our circulation staff is very long-suffering about carting my stack of holds back to my office every day), and the rest mostly from BookMooch, occasional trips to Half Price Books (less now that I no longer live down the street - ah, Austin Half Price Books how I loved thee) and the very occasional review copy (not counting my first trip to ALA last July when I really cleaned up).

But sometimes...the books aren't at the library, on BookMooch, or at Half Price and I just HAVE to have them. Like last summer when I lost patience with collecting Kerry Greenwood mysteries one book at a time from Australian Bookmoochers and splurged on buying the rest of the set.

So, my current splurges: Soulless by Gail Carriger. I've wanted to read this ever since I first heard about it and nobody in our library system has it (a sad fact I hope to remedy as soon as I have time to do a little persuading of the adult fiction buyer). Betraying Season by Marissa Doyle. Same thing here, except it's YA so technically I could buy it, but the system's circ stats for Bewitching Season don't warrant it and I have a backlog of popular and "important" YA to buy. But I got them for me! Maybe I will give them to the library when I've read them. Maybe not.

My other splurge....I bought all four volumes of Tove Jansson's Moomin comic strip, put out in gorgeous hardback by Drawn and Quarterly. My library is one of the few in the systems who owns the first, and the only one who owns the second. I've tried moving them from ya to juvenile, displayed them here and there, and booktalked them, (i.e. forced small children to take them) but they just don't circulate well.

So I got them for me. I won't be reviewing them because, well, you either understand and love Tove Jansson or you completely don't get her. There's no middle road and non-Moomin lovers, well folks, I pity you deeply. Something essential in your soul is missing. Someday I'm going to Finland to visit the Moomin museum and Moomin World theme park.