I've been trying to hold the line on purchasing new books just lately, because I've promised myself a spending spree as a reward for accomplishing a particular task in real life. But sometimes you've just got to shop, and that proved to be the case this past Saturday. One doesn't get cabin fever so much here in drought-stricken Northern California, where the weather is generally sunny and in the upper-50s day after day, but it's still easy to fall into the habit of staying home and working when one telecommutes. That means that when my husband proposed dinner and a used bookstore, I was all for it.

I only bought three books, but they're good ones. The first is a lovely first edition of Red Mandarin Dress by Qiu Xiaolong. I've been interested in this Chinese mystery writer for a while, and this tale of a serial murderer in Shanghai sounds like exactly my type of story. The prologue sets the scene nicely: a man from the China of the Cultural Revolution jogging through (and complaining about) the new capitalist China comes across a body. The clash of the old and the new suggests that this will be an interesting mystery about more than just a series of murders. I'm looking forward to reading it.

I also picked up two in an old series of anthologies edited by Lou Aronica called Full Spectrum -- the original Full Spectrum and Full Spectrum 2, both in mass market paperback. Both indicated on their copyright pages that they were first editions, so I was surprised to get home and find that I already had Full Spectrum 2 -- in hardcover, by a different publisher, in a somewhat different format (that is, the hardcover has an overall introduction as well as a short introduction to each story, while the paperback just has the stories). I'll keep each, since they're different; that's the collector in me. They're in beautiful condition despite the fact that they're almost 20 years old. The stories are by authors who were just starting to become recognized, folks like James Morrow, Nancy Kress, David Brin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Swanwick and Elizabeth Hand. I only need Full Spectrum 3 to make my collection complete -- and darn it, they had it at the store, but I thought I already had it (which is why I bought 2 instead of 3; when you have so many books, you occasionally make those sorts of mistakes).

Several new books also came over the transom from other sources this month. Through the Early Reviewers program at LibraryThing, I received Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love from Bantam Dell Publishing Group. This memoir is the story of a hearing son growing up with deaf parents, and his struggles with having a foot in the hearing world and the other in the deaf world. After reading the first page, I'm hooked, especially by this description of the house in which he grew up: "We lived in Brooklyn, near Coney Island, where on certain summer days, when the wind was blowing just right and our kitchen window was open and the shade drawn up on its roller, I could smell the briny odor of the ocean, layered with just the barest hint of mustard and grilled hot dogs (although that could have been my imagination)."

From Grand Central Publishing, I received Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand. How does one properly categorize this sort of book, which has become all the rage lately? Tough women in paranormal romances -- chick lit with an edge? Kitty is a werewolf, one of the alpha pair of Denver's pack. This is so not my type of book, but I confess that I read the first book of Kitty's adventures, Kitty and The Midnight Hour, and had a really good time with it. Grand Central has sent me all of them since then. Perhaps I need to take them on a beach vacation and read them all with a pitcher of margaritas by my side.

A friend from BookBalloon (a great site for book talk, by the way) sent along paperback copies of Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Son of a Witch. It's rare to see such fine-looking mass market paperbacks these days, with colored edges to the pages (green for Wicked, of course, red for Son of a Witch). I'm happy to have these in this form, as my hardcover copies have become too valuable to actually read. I promise to pass them on to a good home after I've read them, rather than keep the goodies all to myself. But seriously, I've been known to buy paperbacks to read even though I own the hardcover when the hardcover has become too valuable -- that's what I did with Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver just recently, for instance. I don't know if that's the sign of a true collector or of a nut. Or if those are the same thing.

I read nine books in January, and 11 new books came into the house. I have 19 books on hold at the library, and 34 items checked out. I am currently reading 15 books, at one stage or another -- that's how many are sitting on my nightstand table, at any rate, in addition to The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, which simply stays there permanently. I don't seem to be making any real progress on reducing the number of books in the world that I really, really want to read. Isn't that marvelous? An inexhaustible supply. Life is good.