what's on my bookshelf wednesday {2}

Week 2:  A shelf in our bedroom

I finally got around to dragging another bookshelf upstairs into our bedroom last week, so the toppling piles of books that have been collecting dust in various corners of our house have a home at last.  We still have boxes of books in storage that need shelving (oh, the lives of two English majors, one of whom teaches high school English, and the other who seems to keep accepting books from her retired English professor father), but for now we have pretty much found a place for about 85% of our library.  The shelf I'm highlighting this week is the center shelf pictured above, which has a bunch of Margaret Atwood, George R.R. Martin, David Sedaris, and Zadie Smith.

- My first choice from this shelf has to be Chelsea Handler's My Horizontal Life, which I think is the most hilarious of her raunchy memoirs.  Each chapter is another outrageous sexploit, some of which I re-read regularly just to have a gut-busting laugh.  I love that Chelsea (being an audience member at a taping of one of her shows?  probably a highlight of my whole life, let alone our honeymoon).

- My second choice this week is the Songs of Fire and Ice series by George R.R. Martin.  Mike has been a fan of this series for several years, and when HBO started making plans to put Game of Thrones on screen I thought his head might actually explode in excitement.  I decided that if we were going to watch the show, I should at least give the books a try so I'd know the story and characters.  Well.  Umm.  7,000 pages later and I am totally hooked.  I blew through the first 3 books in a little under 5 weeks, and I'm still plugging away at the slower-paced 4th book.  The 5th sits waiting for me on the shelf, and then it'll be years of waiting for the 6th and 7th books to finally be finished and published.  In the meantime, I am devouring every page and counting down until the March release date of the first season of GoT on dvd.

Any favorite series to recommend to me?  I don't usually read fantasy, but Martin has made pretty significant headway in changing that.