Nightstand Books of September

August was fun. August is done. I'll have an update type post later on to let you know what is happening here in author-land lately, but today it's time to dust off the old nightstand and see what sorts of fun things we'll be reading in the near future!Can I just tell you about my relationship with libraries? I love them. I just love libraries so very much. Even my college library, whose fiction section was deplorable and whose fantasy-fiction section was practically non-existent, I still spent many long hours amongst those shelves, my fingers drifting across the old spines of faded hard-cover books. Ahhh, libraries!Unfortunately, libraries are also dangerous places for me. I grew up riding the 1.2-ish miles to the local library on my bike, empty backpack slung over my shoulders almost every week. And every week it was the same... I would start out by looking for a particular or specific book... and then I'd see a title that sounded interesting, and the next thing I knew I'd have a stack of books that barely fit into my backpack, and was murder on my shoulders riding home. The librarian always looked at me skeptically over her glasses as I checked out my enormous pile o' books with a look that said, "Surely you can't possibly expect to read all of these books in two weeks?"But I always did. (Okay, sometimes I had to renew them first).Nowadays, my library addiction has morphed into something entirely other. You see, I have three little munchkins, and I want them to love libraries and books and reading as much as I do. More than I do, if that's even possible. Which means we go to the library a lot. Which poses a huge hurdle to my self-control. Even if I have a stack of perfectly marvelous books waiting on my nightstand to be read... I'll be browsing through the YA section and suddenly, "Oooh! This looks interesting!" and then I can't possibly be bothered to wait or write the title down for another day. It looks interesting NOW, and therefore I must check it out TODAY!Add to that the fact that my children do love reading, and fall in love with books and don't quite comprehend the idea of "borrowing" books from the library and you end up with quite the conundrum. It goes a little something like this:We go to the library and each child checks out 10 books. I see two that look interesting and get them for a total of 22 books.Two weeks later, we need to return some books. But my children have grown quite attached to the books we checked out last time and there are tears, real, mournful, grief-filled tears at the thought of returning some of the books. We compromise and they each keep their 7 favorites from last time, and I return the rest, as well as the one I finished. (We now have 15 books at home)Each child is told they may pick out three books (but they convince me to let them pick out 4, and I grab 5 children's books that strike my fancy because I think they will be fun to read to my kids), and then I get another book for myself. Now we have 29 books at home.Two weeks later, each child can only be convinced to part with two books, and I still haven't finished either of mine, so we take four books back to the library and end up going a little nuts (because I neglected to give them a maximum limit this time) and check out 28 more books for a grand total of 53 books checked out of the library... and it will continue to escalate until either we run out of renewals (our library lets us renew books 10 times - a dangerous practice on their part) or we have to go on vacation, in which case I purge the house of library books, whether or not they've been read, and we start over once we get home.Well, with that little bit of insight into how things work in my house, here are my September Nightstand books (in spite of the fact that I still have 2 Mistborn books and Firefight on loan from friends that I need to read): At the bottom, we have The Dragon of Trelian by Michelle Knudsen, which I am over halfway through already and am pleased to inform you that it is the best juvenile fiction fantasy book I have had the pleasure of reading in a very long time. I am loving this book.Next up we have my Bible, which I am sad to admit I had gotten out of the habit of reading every day and want to be better about. I'm currently working my way through 2 Chronicles and Hosea, and am about to start a study of James when my Ladies AM Bible Study (LAMBS) starts up again in a couple of weeks.Next up is probably cheating, but it's my "ideas" journal, where I've been taking notes for my next series after The Minstrel's Song and brainstorming outlines for the second and third books in that series (more on that later).And finally, Wendy by Karen Wallace - a retelling of Peter Pan, which I grabbed from the library because I happened across it randomly last time we were there.What are you reading this month, dear Reader? I'd love to hear what's on your reading list!