As always, Christmas and my birthday brought me a smorgasbord of new books. Which is awesome. I love books, and I love my family who know I will always be happy with them as a present.

For Christmas I got:

The Bricks That Built the Houses by Kate Tempest
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto
Bossypants by Tina Fey
The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones
The Public Confessions of a Middle-aged Woman by Sue Townsend
Stay With Me by Ayòbámi Adébáyò
Pompeii by Mary Beard
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Pompeii Awakened by Judith Harris
Penguin Modern Poets 3: Your Family, Your Body by Malika Booker, Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire
Bread and a Dog by Natsuko Kuwahara
Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo

And then for my birthday I got even more books, but in fairness 50 of them are mini books containing a short story or essay:

Diary of a Tokyo Teen by Christine Mari Inzer
Penguin Modern boxset
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea by Melissa Fleming

The TBR is now groaning (I’m genuinely not sure how to fit all these new books on the TBR bookcase).

Happy New Year everyone!

UPDATE: I got two more late birthday presents and they are too awesome not to share.

Yes, that’s a Janelle Monáe T-shirt and it’s creased because I’ve already worn it. The book is Paper Girls Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang. Vaughan is also the author of Ex-Machina, Y: the Last Man, Pride of Baghdad and Saga, all of which I have enjoyed a lot. Paper Girls is pretty much the only gap in my Vaughan knowledge and I’m excited to read it. And the other item in the picture is a set of reading-related stickers. My friends are awesome.