Vacation Buys

As promised, I'm back from the wedding trip. It was hectic and not at all a relaxing trip, but Sedona and Flagstaff are lovely, and The Boyfriend and I did manage to do some fun, just-for-us things while we weren't scrambling to set up candles in our fancy clothes. One of these fun things, as mentioned in my last post, was a trip to Bookman's during our very brief time in Flagstaff. We don't get up to Flagstaff very often, but I always try to take in this store when we do, especially since our local chain bookstore, a Hastings, went under about a year ago.

Bookman's is a used book store, though they carry other secondhand media as well, and this one has a good comics and manga section that always manages to carve a slice out of my budget. I even went in with a list this time, to see if they had cheap copies of anything I'd been eyeing. Here's what I came home with:

• Tsubasa: Those with Wings (Natsuki Takaya), volume one. This is billed as a fantasy adventure on the back cover, with an ex-thief and "a legendary object that grants its beholder any wish". Could be fun?
• Threads of Time (Mi Young Noh), volumes one and two. This is the only title I found that was on my list. It's about a modern student who lives a parallel life in the thirteenth century, according to the cover copy. We'll see!
• Tales of Zestiria (Shirahime), volume one. This is based on a fantasy video game that, not being a gamer, I've never heard of. But I like fantasy, and I liked .hack, which is also based on a game, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
• Silent Möbius Complete Edition (Kia Asamiya), volume one. The cover copy describes a far future scifi story with an all-female force fighting inter-dimensional invaders, which sounds totally awesome. It's also a nice edition with some color pages.
• Hinges Book 3: Mechanical Men (Meredith McClaren). I broke some personal shopping rules with this one. I never buy later volumes of series unless I've read the earlier volumes, and I never buy books with no cover copy. Rarely I will break these rules if I'm very familiar with the author or if it's an unbelievable bargain. This book meets none of those criteria. But I read the first few pages, where a character (I assume the protagonist?) is sitting on a beach mourning someone who has just died. I don't know anyone's names, but it felt like such a real and present grief that I bought the book just on the strength of those pages. I'm going to wait to read it while I find the earlier two volumes, but I have some high hopes.

I did some other shopping, but that's it for comics! I've also done some reading, both over the trip and in the two days since I got back, and I'll be reporting on that in a day or two. Have you read any of these? What did you think of them? Have I made a blunder or found a gem?