We Tried to Visit Albuquerque’s New Romance Bookstore… and Ended Up With This Haul
Today, Liv and I tried to visit Vellum & Vine, Albuquerque's first woman-owned romance bookstore. We'd been seeing it all over our social media feeds for the past few months, so of course we wanted to check it out.
However, when we arrived about three hours after opening, we found a line wrapping around the building and into an alley.
Unwilling to wait, unshaded, in the Albuquerque heat, we made our way across the street to our local Barnes & Noble instead.
I think a lot of people had the exact same idea. After all, we'd been promised books, and book lovers will always find a way. Barnes & Noble was packed too.
The Barnes & Noble at Cottonwood Mall is two stories tall, with fiction on the lower level and nonfiction, music, puzzles, games, and the kids' sections upstairs. More importantly, they were having a 50% off hardcover sale. Now, I don't really like hardcovers. But 50% off is 50% off! And I still managed to walk out with four books.
Apparently I'm in My Vampire Romance Era
I've been in the mood for a good vampire romance ever since reading Empire of the Vampire. That's not to say Empire of the Vampire has a ton of romance. It's definitely more of a subplot, but apparently it was enough to awaken something in me. (You can check out my review of the first book here.)
First, I picked up Anathema by Keri Lake. According to my very quick Google search in the middle of Barnes & Noble, this was going to satisfy my current craving for dark, vampire-y romance. It was far too busy to stop an employee and ask for vampire romance recommendations, and, admittedly, I would've been a little embarrassed asking the mostly male attendants where they kept their best vampire romances. So Google it was.
From the 50% off hardcover shelf, I found The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan. I'm actually not sure if this one involves vampires at all, but there was talk of a beast in the synopsis tucked inside the dust jacket. Naturally, my next question was: But is there romance? Google said yes. Into the pile it went!
Then there was Conform by Ariel Sullivan, which, strangely enough, gave me two Sullivans in one haul. This one sounded like some combination of spies, dystopia, and enemies-to-lovers romance, so obviously I picked that one up too.
I told you. I was prepared to go to a romance bookstore!
And Then There's Virgil
My odd pick of the day was The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by Scott McGill and Susannah Wright. I'm challenging myself a little with this one because I've never really read an epic poem before. The decision mostly came from the fact that Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin had been sitting on my shelf for the longest time, and I finally picked it up as my current physical read after finishing my poolside read, Alone With You in the Ether.
I'm not very familiar with Roman mythology, and I'd like to be. So I'm trying my first real book pairing: The Aeneid and Lavinia. One ancient, one modern.
Le Guin's novel takes Lavinia, a woman who barely gets a voice in Virgil's epic, and gives her an entire story of her own. I think it'll be interesting to read the two alongside each other and see what changes when a character who existed largely on the edges of an ancient story gets to become the center of a modern one.
We'll see how this goes. I may have accidentally assigned myself homework.
The Ones I Left Behind
Anyways, here are some honorable mentions I absolutely would have picked up if I were a rich woman and had unlimited space on my shelves:
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