Bookends Buys!

Guess what?!  I got some new books!  :) Found at my local used book store Bookends! (isn't that just the cutest name ever?) It's packed with everything from tons of old Star Trek novels, to great fantasy, crime, and well cookbooks.  Haha.  I love Bookends so much!  Mostly because I can buy a hard back book in good condition for $2.50.  :)  Here's my haul!

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work.

In this bizarre thriller for the Christian market, a jilted old woman with a hatred for men has a deadly secret that could wreak havoc upon the population of the Oregon coast. Framing his novel around chess strategy, Wilson introduces Josee Walker, once given up for adoption rather unbelievably by her wealthy parents, Kara and Marsh Addison. Now a cynical artist and poet in her 20s, she's come upon a canister that will make her a pawn in a horrendous scheme. The canister holds a poison for the body and the soul. "Hidden things are at work here," cautions Marsh's mother. "Elements that remain dark to our mortal eyes." Things get creepy, with blood and vaporous green mists like serpents showing up in unlikely places. To help defeat the forces of evil, Josee must rely on the fragments of a faith she's mostly left behind.

Hippolyta was Penthesilea, or Queen of the Amazons. She ruled as war leader and high priestess of a scattered tribe of women warriors who had dwelt on the high plains to the north and east of Persia for time out of mind. They were not isolated---travelers came and went through their territory, bringing news from the west, and carrying tales of the warrior women back home with them.

But the Queen had a great grief in her life: her daughter and heir was a strange child. The girl had been born, so the Priestesses said, without a soul. And it was true that she was like no other child alive. She did not speak, and often seemed not to even see the people around her. She could not dress or feed herself, but she could ride and hunt like no other woman of the tribe. Many of the Amazons believed that the child must never be Queen, but that was a problem for a later time--Hippolyta was young and strong.

Selene, the niece of the tribe's Seer, was put in charge of the child, to be her nursemaid and guardian. And it was a good, though sometimes difficult, life for many turns of the years. But then one day news came from the West of a new Conqueror, a young man who came out of Macedon with a spirit like flame, intending to rule the whole world. The Queen's daughter responded to the tale as a woman in the desert would to the sound of falling water. That very night she stole out of the camp and rode west. Selene could not stop her, and so she must follow, praying that the Queen would understand. Hippolyta herself followed the next day, and so they rode together, controlled by the child's compulsion, until they had crossed the mountains and entered into Alexander's Empire, and under the sway of Alexander's powerful personality.

I'm really excited to get reading! I've already read the Road, but I felt like I needed to buy it.  And the covers of the other two just had me entranced as soon as I saw them!  They both sound amazing!