#3019 a mother lode of new books!

I just wanted to tell you about the glorious book haul I got at the library this week. 

The Salt Lake County Library has a program called Reader's Choice that they do two or three times a year. Between 12 and 20 books are chosen from all different genres, both fiction and non-fiction. Readers can read as many books as they like, and then vote for their favorite. I think there's a gift card raffle for people who vote. I don't usually vote, but I like to read some of the books.

As luck would have it, I finished a book on Jan 2, so I decided to return it (it's a hot title with lots of hold requests). Since it was the first business day of the year, the Reader's Choice display was fresh and new and loaded with brand new books! Brand. New. I went ahead and picked up the four shown above. Two of them are romance books, as you can see, and the other two are about old fellas.

I'm currently reading The Borrowed Life of Fredrick Fife. It's set in Australia, and it's about an old fella, Fredrick, who is down on his luck until he comes upon an old fella who is in an even worse way - he's unalive. Things happen, and Fredrick ends up going to the dead fella's nursing home. Fredrick and Bernard, the dead guy, look enough alike that no one really even gives it a thought, which is pretty disturbing if you think about it. As much as Fredrick tries to protest and tell someone what happened, no one believes him because Bernard had dementia, so they think that Fredrick/Bernard is making stuff up. 

Okay, so as I'm reading this synopsis, it sounds pretty awful. The good news is that it isn't awful. It's pretty sweet, once you get over what happens to Bernard. I'm close to half-way through the book, and my eyes have already leaked a couple of times, 

Anyway, the real high point is that each of these four books is brand new, never been opened. I'm the first person to crack the spines on these four copies. That is so rare for library books! I'm pretty delighted by the situation.