This is what £120 of books looks like… Birthday Book Haul

So it was recently my 29th birthday and I’ve found that, as I get older, it becomes harder and harder to tell people what you’d like for your birthday. I mean, as an adult, if there’s something you want or need, you just… buy it, right?

This year, I just asked people for money and book vouchers. My family isn’t a huge fan of that, really, and I understand why. But I haven’t spent that much on books for a few months and there were so many new releases that I was dying to read. I’d decided that on my birthday, I was going to head into Leeds Waterstones, on my own, and do a lengthy, peaceful, solitary book shop.

It was amazing and I had the best time. Just wandering round, no time limits, no need to get back to work, no resigned partner toddling after me, pulling books of shelves without looking at the prices. It was a great day.

I didn’t actually do that well until I headed upstairs to the Fantasy section where I chose pretty much most of my books. This is what I bought from Waterstones. If there’s a link, it means I’ve reviewed it already:

The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas
The Smoke Thieves by Sally Green
The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty
The Queens of Innis Lear by
I Still Dream by James Smythe
In the Labyrinth of Drakes (Lady Trent #4) by Marie Brennan

I would like to point out that four of these are hefty hardbacks, which wasn’t the best decision when I had to lug them all home on the train. That said, I was super excited to find a pristine copy of The City of Brass, which is the first book I started reading that afternoon. I really can’t recommend it highly enough and I’m dying for the second book to come out in January 2019.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get all the books I wanted in Waterstones, so naturally I put an Amazon order in whilst on the train home. Because clearly I hadn’t bought enough books yet. The aforementioned order comprised:

All Systems Red by Martha Wells
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar
The Invasion (sequel to The Call) by Peadar O’Guilin
A Hundred Thousand Worlds by Bob Proehl
The Other Normals by Ned Vizzini
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Ravenclaw edition) by J.K. Rowling

And then. Then, I received a lovely book package from Charlotte, who is a lovely person with excellent taste in books and she’d picked out the following:

Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl
S. by J.J. Abrams
Suicide Game by Haidji

I read Neverworld Wake the day it arrived, just because it looked reasonably light and the blurb was different to how I’d remembered it. It ended up completely blowing me away in a sort of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle way, but for teenagers.

I guess the question would be – why, when I have had a week’s annual leave and a subsequent quiet week at work, why haven’t I read more of these amazing books, on which I spent so much money? Umm. That would be because I decided to reread three of the Harry Potter books instead… and no, not the one I’d recently bought in the shiny edition.

C’est la vie.