What did YOU buy today? June 2016

An interesting looking ARC, right off the bat this month: The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon. Due to be published here July 2016, it's a story with children as the protagonists, and a mystery.

Probably thriller-y, since the blurb on the front is from Paula Hawkins, author of Girl on the Train.

Picked up my history book group's November choice: Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant.

Also American Civil War, and with a local connection, Black Iron Mercy by Eric Schlehlein is a novel that came home with me. It's a print on demand title from a small Georgia publisher. I usually avoid both e-books and print-on-demand, but made an exception.

One ARC today, which doesn't come out until November: _The Shores of Tripoli_ by James L. Haley. It's an historical novel about the Barbary pirates.

Bought two novels: Speakers of the Dead: A Walt Whitman Mystery by J. Aaron Sanders, and Blood of Tyrants by Naomi Novik.

The first is an historical mystery. The latter is an alternate history fantasy novel. I own all the other of Novik's Temeraire novels with the exception of the one that came out in hardcover this week, League of Dragons.

Brought home two ARCs, leaving a few others that looked interesting behind -- wow, my apartment's full of books:

* _Saving Jake_ by Sharon Sala (pub date 10/16; contemporary romance, I've liked her romantic suspense in the past)

* First Star I See Tonight by Susan Elizabeth Phillips (pub date 8/16; contemporary romance, she usually brings the funny, and in this one she seems to be turning tropes upside down)

One final ARC for the month, oddly arriving after the declared pub date of May 2016: The House Between Tides by Sarah Maine, a multiple time period novel that they're billing as "Kate Morton meets Daphne DuMaurier."

So if you don't mind me asking, what did you think of "Black Iron Mercy?"

I'm afraid that like thousands of other books in my apartment, it's tsundoku. My eyes are bigger than my stomach when it comes to books, even now that I can't afford to buy any on a regular basis and mostly bring home ARCs.

One of my coworkers asked me for years if I had read Pynchon's _Mason & Dixon_ yet. I bought it new, in hardcover, and it's still unread.