Monday Malarkey - a little late in the day but who's counting?

Wow, are we busy bees, around here. I have finally begun seriously packing with around two weeks till closing on our new house. We've been having fun wandering the hardware store aisles and furniture stores, looking at lighting and tile, paint colors and furniture swatches (because we don't actually own a sofa and Kiddo will be taking the futon in the fall) and ladders (because the ceilings are higher and the roof is steeper than that of our current home).

The de-pinking of our possible-maybe future library will be high on the agenda:

Even the interior of the closet is pink.

I finished one book, this weekend. I'm thrilled! And, speaking of thrills . . . it just happens to be a British thriller that has been sitting on a shelf for several years:

Soft Target by Stephen Leather is one of many books in a series about undercover cop Dan Shepherd, but it stands alone just fine. While posing as a hitman to prevent not one but two attempted murders, Shepherd must also deal with trying to find an au pair to care for his son. Add to that a second undercover job trying to catch two dirty cops who have stolen from drug dealers, two possible terrorist threats and one store robbery and there is a lot of action packed into Soft Target's 520 pages. While some of the strands of this novel were predictable, I didn't think it mattered. I was having too much fun.

Which leads to the shocking revelation that I found a few future releases so irresistible that I went on a minor requesting binge. I'll pay penance by trying to fill up my donation bags faster. Fortunately, they're all September releases.

Everything that walked in, this past week:

• Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace by Michael Perry - from Harper for review
• The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin - from Harper for review
• The Mirrored World by Debra Dean - from Harper for review
• Plague: A Gone Novel by Michael Grant - from Paperback Swap
• A Place Beyond Courage by Elizabeth Chadwick - from Sourcebooks for review
• Miss Buncle's Book by D. E. Stevenson - from Sourcebooks for review
• A River Runs Through It and Other Stories by Norman Maclean - gift from Book Club Care. Thanks, Carrie!

My sidebar is getting embarrassing. I'm still reading Johnson's Life of London by Boris Johnson (whose hair I will happily cut in tidy layers, if he wants me to pop over to London . . . any time, Mr. Mayor), but I'm still craving fiction and it really needs to be fairly fast-paced to keep my attention. I haven't touched Learned Optimism in at least 3 weeks. I still plan to finish it; I just can't get excited about it, right now. I'm feeling awfully optimistic with a new house and loads of DIY projects in my future, after all.

After finishing Soft Target, I discovered I have 3 fiction ARCs remaining and I chose to begin reading Marsha Altman's latest Darcy book, The Knights of Derbyshire. So far, so good.

Then, Isabel decided to bring me a purple mouse in the middle of the night and when she jumped onto the bed for a head rub of praise, she managed to pull me out of a tremendously cool dream in which our new house was a former bookstore with built-in shelves on all the walls and an unfinished loft. I couldn't get back to sleep, so I started reading Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson. Perfect for my mood! Plus, there is a nice robot/human fight-scene chapter that takes place at a fictional store in Tulsa's Utica Square Mall, a place I know well and enjoyed visiting fictionally, even if it was a bit of a violent experience.

Tomorrow, we will be knocked off the internet. AT&T was sending us threatening missives. Call us about your upgrade to U-Verse or we will kill your internet and phone service! Fine, fine. Geez, some corporations are so severe. They need to take a major chill pill. We're getting upgraded, tomorrow. And, then when we've finished our pre-move painting and shifted to the new house, we shall ditch them. Mwah-ha. Take that, AT&T.

Since I've begun packing and this move is going to take for-freaking-ever, I'm likely going to limit my book reviews to weekly Monday Malarkey updates and the odd mini review, for a while. They're probably more palatable, anyway. I tend to go overboard when I get serious about "reviewing". I'll try to keep doing Wahoo! Wednesday posts and Fiona Fridays, if possible. And, I have decided this Thursday will be my Children's Day - 4 reviews, all picture books for preschoolers. Please pardon my limited ability to visit other blogs, for a while.

I'm getting over it:

You know how I've been slightly mourning the idea of leaving behind the things that I love about this house, like the gorgeous bathroom tile and the totally-me kitchen updates? I'm getting over the clingy stage, already. I'm having so much fun planning changes in the new house (after painting, the #1 project will involve brightening up a tiny water closet -- just a toilet in a claustrophobia-inducing, closet-sized space -- with tile and mirrors and whatnot) that what I'm leaving behind isn't even entering my mind, anymore. Wahoo for that.

Okay, off to bed. Those middle-of-the-night cat wake-up calls are killers. Happy new week!

Still-very-cheerful Bookfool

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