Stacking the Shelves: The Replacement Edition

 "Stacking the Shelves" is a weekly haul meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews and Reading Reality. It allows book buyers to share their accumulation of books with the online book-loving community.

I've skipped a week or two of Stacking the Shelves posts. Why? Because life has been utter chaos. I have a major deadline next week, and I'm wondering how in the world it'll get done; my place looks like a complete disaster; my sister is visiting this weekend, so I have to spend time with family instead of clean; and I hurt my back organizing and cleaning. So it's safe to say, July has not been my favorite month of 2024 so far. The good news is, I got some pretty decent bookish mail. Though I have had to return a bunch of books because Amazon is awful at shipping.

Up first is this large stack of books. My Barnes & Noble preorders of The Sky on Fire by Jenn Lyons and Masquerade by O.O. Sangoyomi arrived. I didn't realize Masquerade would be so small. Hopefully that doesn't affect the story at all, because it sounded really good. My preorder of the FairyLoot edition of The Curse of Sins by Kate Dramis also arrived. It's a chunker. And here's where things get a little crazy. I got a free Prime subscription for the month, so I made an Amazon order for the three Dark Elements books in the jewel-looking covers, along with the second book in the Darkmore Penitentiary series, Alpha Wolf. Now, I already own the jewel covers, but they're going out of print, and I was thinking about replacing my current ones with some newer ones, as mine are kind of older and they've moved around a lot. Well, Amazon sent two batches of bad versions. They were either damaged or unmatching (slick cover versus matte). So, I decided to just order them from B&N instead. And guess what? They arrived in great condition. So, needless to say, I'll once again only be ordering from Amazon for cheap deals or indie books. Speaking of cheap deals, I got an extra copy of FORAW for $10 on Amazon to use for my Dirty Diction dust jacket. Oh, and the extra copy of Alpha Wolf is because the first arrived in a wet mailer and the book was a bit wavy, so I asked for a replacement. I didn't have to return the original, though. I'm giving the extra to a friend. 

 

Up next, I have the second Dark Elements book. This was the one that arrived from Amazon with a slick cover, so I ordered it from B&N for a matte version. I also ordered the new covers of the Captive Prince sequels from B&N. Unfortunately, though, book two didn't come with the new cover, so now I have to return it. Ugh. I hate having to return things when it's not your fault they sent you the wrong item. It's kind of a waste of my time and money.

 

I honestly forgot this thing was coming. It's a replacement dust jacket for the Arcane Society edition of Ashes of Chaos by Amelia Hutchins. The original was missing the author's name, I believe. I probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't seen someone mention it on Facebook. This was a subscription set from Arcane, so it wasn't a set I ordered myself. I usually pay more attention to those types of preorders.

 

This is a poorly photographed Zodiac Academy shirt that I bought off of Etsy. It's an amazing quote from Seth, and I can't wait to wear this shirt to ApollyCon next year. I feel like that's the only place I can wear my bookish shirts anymore. I don't typically wear them to the gym because I don't want them to get sweat stains or something. But yeah, I'm excited for this one. And it's navy blue instead of black! I'm glad to be adding to my small colored shirt collection. Ha ha.

 And next, we have the reason my back hurts. I ordered some shelves to temporarily hold my books while I organize the books in my other rooms. These shelves are sitting in my dining room/kitchen area right now. I don't particularly like having them there, but I got tired of having boxes of books on my floors. Of course, before I could put all the books on the shelves, I ended up tweaking my back, so this is as much progress as I've made. At this rate, it'll be summer of 2025 before all this gets done. Sigh. Eventually, though, there won't be any books on these shelves, or at least, only coffee-table type books. They will hopefully just hold fake plants, photos, knick-knacks, and kitchen-related stuff in the future.

And finally, I have the ebooks. While I have Kindle Unlimited, I downloaded Spark of the Everflame by Penn Cole, Daywalkers by Emilia Mondragon, Bound by Shadows by Vera Winters, Silk & Sand by Katherine Diane, Heartless Hunter by Kristen Ciccarelli, and The Silent Prince by L. Eveland. I also got a couple of free Kindle books, including Shield & Sorrow by J.E. Ridge and A Dance with a Fae Prince by Elise Kova.

Well, that's all for me. What books have you bought/received lately?