i won't keep what i can't catch

Last week was a little crazy. I had a good time with JT. Since then I've been really busy at work and in my spare time, and to make that harder I've been feeling a little under the weather. I still need to find the right balance, apparently. But, books! That's what last week was all about, and I got a few at BEA that I'm REALLY excited about. Here are my top five: The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater, The Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund, The Diviners by Libba Bray, The Curiosities by Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, and Brenna Yovanoff, and Carnival of Souls by Melissa Marr. There were a lot of great book giveaways this year, and I definitely came out of BEA with more books than I intended to. It's just hard to stop myself when there are so many good-looking books around!
On the unfucking my life end of things, I haven't made a whole lot of progress at home. I've done some reorganizing in the office, and established that the printer LG gave me last fall does in fact work just fine with my laptop. At work, though, I've made quite a bit of progress. I've recycled a lot of old materials. I now have a pile of copyedited manuscripts to return to the editors. I've put some more recent material up on the shelves, so I need to finish that, and mail some things I've accumulated for other people. Progress! It definitely feels better in my office.
I have a book to tell you about. 19) A Local Habitation by Seanan McGuire, second book in the October Daye series. I love the characters in this series. Toby is so flawed, so easy to empathize with sometimes. Some of the fey characters are great, like Tybalt. I liked a lot of the characters in this one. And I enjoyed the writing, as always; it carried me effortlessly through the story. But the story itself was a downer. Toby pretty much completely failed at what she set out to do in this novel. A lot of people died. There's a lot of sadness, confusion, deception, and anger in this one. This certainly won't deter me from the next one--sometimes a series has to go into a dark place for the character to learn what's necessary--but I really hope the next book in the series is a little less sad.
I had a strange dream the other night. It was so long, I don't have time to type out the whole thing right now. In a nutshell, it was about being kidnapped and held in one room with my sister J and two younger kids for about a year. But the dream wasn't actually that year. It was the moments leading up to my kidnapping, and then the moment of our escape, and then the aftermath of it. My utter inability to deal with the people I'd been close to before. That dream felt like it went on for hours, and was immensely emotionally draining. I was wiped out yesterday from it.
Anyway. I would love to keep babbling at you all, but I've got a lot of work to do today. So. Happy Thursday, and Blessed Be!