September Book Hauls – Book Outlet & Book of the Month!

I was fortunate enough to obtain some really great books in the month of September, most of them from Book Outlet, as well as a couple from my first Book of the Month box.

Book Outlet

I just recently learned about the discount book website Book Outlet, and I’m officially obsessed. I spent at least an hour browsing their massive selection, before settling on seven books, which ended up costing just $35, including shipping and tax. Yes, really.

The important thing to note about Book Outlet is that their stock rotates frequently, so if you see a book you really want, you should purchase it as soon as you’re able to. I just got this box of books, and many of them are already sold out, so for those, I’ve included links for you to purchase them on Amazon.

Another quick note: many of the books available on Book Outlet are bargain books or scratch and dent copies. I chose the bargain books, some of which have a small scratch or line marked on the top or bottom of the pages.

Here are the books I got, and why I’m excited to read them:

• Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
  This is one of two from this haul that I’ve started reading already and, despite being only halfway through it, I’m in love. I’ve been craving a great high fantasy novel, and this certainly is that. It takes place in a world where people who could do magic, called Magi, once ruled. Now, however, the magic is gone, and those Magi are being repressed and killed. We follow the story of Zelie Adebola, a young girl who is given the chance to bring magic back and save people like her.
• Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
  In this collection of poems, Woodson talks about growing up as an African American in the 60s and 70s. The prose is beautiful, and the topic is an important one.
• An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
  I don’t know much about this book but purchased it because I’d heard from a plethora of sources that it was an incredible story. It follows a couple, one of whom is accused of a crime that they didn’t commit.
• The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
  It’s been ages since I’ve read historical fiction, and I really want to get back into it. When I came across this on Book Outlet, I checked ratings on Amazon, and it’s rated 5 stars with over 37,000 reviews. So yeah, I bought it.
• Scythe by Neal Shusterman
  This is the first part of the Arc of a Scythe trilogy. The second book, Thunderhead, was also available, so I’m actually going to be placing a second order next month to get that. The trilogy sounds so interesting – it’s a world where scythes are the only people who can end a life, which they do to keep the population under control.
• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
  The first sentence of the synopsis of this book had me hooked: “In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism.” I can’t wait to read it.
• Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
  When I went back to Book Outlet today to grab the link to this book, I saw that The Night Masquerade is now available as well, which is book five in this series. I’ve seen my favorite author, Neil Gaiman, write good things about this series, and I trust his judgment, so I wanted to give it a shot. I’m not sure about the rest of the series, but book one is very short – more a novella than a novel, so I feel like I’ll be able to finish it in a just a few hours.

Book of the Month

I’m obsessed with subscription boxes. I love coming home from a long day at the call center where I work to find a box full of goodies waiting for me. There are so many I would love to subscribe to, although subscribing to all of them would definitely be way outside of my current budget.

Thus, I ended up choosing two to start with: Book of the Month and OwlCrate. While my OwlCrate subscription is starting in October, I did receive my first Book of the Month box in September.

The thing that attracted me to Book of the Month was its simplicity and affordability. For $14.99 per month, you get to pick a book out of their monthly selection, and extra books from their backstock just add $9.99. The books are hardcover editions, so that’s quite a bit cheaper than buying the books from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

For my monthly selection, I chose The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, even though it was a tough decision between that and The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock. The Silence of the Girls takes place during the events of The Illiad and is told from the point of views of the women who are captured and enslaved, including Queen Briseis.

I also got to choose a free book because I had a discount code, so I selected The Line that Held Us by David Joy. I’d never heard of that book before, and selected it on a whim, but when I received it, I was excited to see that the author is from Sylva, NC, which is where I went to college. I’m looking forward to reading it.

If you want to try out Book of the Month, I have a referral code you can use!

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I hope you enjoyed this book haul! I’m thinking about doing them more often since I frequently find myself in situations where I impulse buy discount books. Have you read any of the books I mentioned above? What were your thoughts?

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