The Darwin Awards and Stocking up for 2009

I dragged myself and my sister to the library today to pick up a few books. As always, I had written down the titles and locations of the books by searching the catalog online first and planned to be in and out in 15 minutes. Of course, we were there for over an hour and only left as soon as we did because the library has been closing early during the holidays.

My sister ended up with two books, and I managed to find seven, only two of which,
The Keep by Jennifer Egan and
A Separate Peace by John Knowles,
were actually on my original list. I also browsed around and picked up:
Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron,
Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong by Pierre Bayard,
Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper,
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld and
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I feel that I'm being overly ambitious considering I have a job and I return to school in two weeks. I do tend to check out more books than I actually read because I like to have a variety of choices at all times, but these are all such compelling choices I'm going to have a hard time choosing. I'm leaning toward A Thousand Splendid Suns because I enjoyed The Kite Runner so much, but I'm also really curious about American Wife, and The Keep, and... well you get the picture.

The other issue is that I have all these beautiful, shiny library books in front of me, and several Christmas presents as well, but with 2009 only a few days away, I feel as though I should wait so they will count toward my total in the challenge. I know I won't get very far in the next few days because they're going to be busy, but still, I feel like someone set a steaming cup of coffee in front of me and told me not to drink it.

Thinking back on it, I should have gotten The Darwin Awards Next Evolution by Wendy Northcutt. I put it back because I already had several choices picked out. It's a book I never would have finished, I eventually get bored with stories of people doing stupid things, but it would have been the perfect tide-me-over for the next couple of days.

Don't forget to enter the raffle to win a brand-new copy of The Time Traveler's Wife!