Books In the Post - 'Broken Toe Edition'

My foot is killing me :o( In an attempt to rescue Elana from hitting the kitchen floor (after being flipped out of her chair by Hope, long story...) I broke my toe; one of the smaller ones but it hurts like a son of a... it hurts a lot. What's really bad is that Hope occasionally forgets what happened and treads on my foot! It was almost worth it though to have her tie a little ribbon around my toe to make it feel better :o) Kids are cute aren't they...?
Last week wasn't the best of weeks then, with that and other stuff going on, but it ended on a good note with loads of sunshine, a barbecue and a whole load of great looking books arriving on the doorstep. I want to read them all! Well, almost all of them... Do you want to see them? Yeah, you do...

The Fantasy Masterworks collection is another two books closer to completion. Not ideal editions ('Lud in the Mist' has a different cover to the one I was expecting and 'Beauty' is an ex-library copy...) but it's the stories I'm really interested in and I want to get round to these sooner rather than later, 'Lud in the Mist' in particular.

It feels like I've been waiting for 'Sworn in Steel' forever, even longer than I waited for 'A Dance With Dragons' (blatantly untrue, just feels like it) Most anticipated read of 2014 then? Quite possibly and one I'll be getting to after I finish reading 'A Promise of Blood'. I'd heard good things about 'The Remaining' which is why I tore through it over the weekend and will be posting my review tomorrow. It's not a bad read at all.

It seems that there are loads of books that I want to read all at once (isn't that a great feeling to have?) and 'Authority' is one of them after I had an enjoyable, if slightly unsettling experience, reading 'Annihilation'. 'Authority' is neck and neck with 'Sworn in Steel' for book that will be read next and it could go either way...
'Station Eleven' though, I'm really not sure about this one (despite the gorgeous cover). Have a look at this blurb and tell me that it doesn't remind you of 'The Stand',

DAY ONE
The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb.
News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%.

WEEK TWO
Civilization has crumbled.

YEAR TWENTY
A band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe.

But now a new danger looms, and he threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild. 

STATION ELEVEN
Moving backwards and forwards in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after, Station Eleven charts the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people: famous actor Arthur Leander; Jeevan - warned about the flu just in time; Arthur's first wife Miranda; Arthur's oldest friend Clark; Kirsten, a young actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-proclaimed 'prophet'. 

Doesn't that remind you of 'The Stand'? It reminds me of 'The Stand' (albeit possibly without the element of horror) and I'm not sure that I want to read 'The Stand' all over again. If I want to do that then I'll just read 'The Stand'. And that's enough of me trying to fit 'The Stand' as many times as I can into three sentences, five is a pretty respectable score I think :o)

I started reading 'Promise of Blood' this morning and I'm already thinking 'why didn't I read this book sooner?' It is amazing, thank you Jared for pointing me at this book. Is it me or does that look like George Lucas on the cover...? I'm kind of half and half on 'Fool's Assassin' (read the other books but it was a bit of a hard slog due to Fitz being, well... Fitz) but can see myself probably reading it anyway, apparently I'm a sucker for hard looking warrior types on a cover.
'Steles of the Sky' will definitely be read but I still need to read the first two books in the trilogy. Time marches on, and blogs change, but I will always be late to the party as far as reading acclaimed books go. I wouldn't have it any other way personally, it's not like there aren't loads of books to read in the meantime :o)

So, have any of these books caught your eye?