So I said I was going to share my incomings on 1 Jan, but I’ve already got a load of stats, planned books and books of the year to share then, and I have two books on the go at the moment I MIGHT finish and review tomorrow, so why not have a poke around in my acquisitions now, I thought!

Pre-Christmas, these made it into the house and have been sitting around on my desk waiting … for what, I’m not sure.

Well, I know that I should NOT have bought Ada Cambridge’s “The Three Miss Kings” dangerously close to the Christmas’n’birthday season in case someone had already purchased it for me, but it’s a beautifully pristine Virago Green and I could NOT leave it in Oxfam books when I was rooting around looking for gifts for my BookCrossing not so secret Santee. Also, handily, it will work for Australia Reading Month in 2020. Kaggsy from The Ramblings very kindly sent me Joe Moran’s “On Roads” which was on my wishlist but I kept back for similar reasons (I know my friend Caroline will be eying this one for after me). The band Madness’ “Before We Was We: Madness by Madness” and Danny MacAskill’s “At The Edge” were both sent to me by clients for whom I worked as an assistant on the books – I’m very excited to read how they came out (have a look at McAskill’s cycling videos on YouTube – amazing stuff!).

Now on to Christmas. Here’s the whole pile, in approximate order of arrival:

Going from the top, Rebecca Front’s “Curious” is her sort-of memoir and Pamela Brown’s “Maddy Again” is one more of the Blue Door Theatre Adventures reprints, both given to me (along with chocolates and a lovely notebook) by Meg, who was my BookCrossing secret santa, received on 16 December. I’ve popped “The Twelve Birds of Christmas” by Stephen Moss, which takes twelve birds that might have been in the song and tells us about them, into the pile because although our friend Linda gave it to Matthew, I know I’ll be reading it, too. Then Gill did her usual trawl through the books that have been on my wishlist the longest and found me Robert Inman’s “Captain Saturday”, a novel set in the Deep South – I enjoyed his “Dairy Queen Days” very much a long time ago – and “The Kindness of Strangers”, a Lonely Planet title edited by Don George which features stories of kindness when travelling and should be a lovely positive read.  Meg did brilliantly again,  not only buying me a copy of Jess Phillips MP’S “Truth to Power”, which includes ways to challenge power and stories of people who have, but getting Jess to sign it to me (she’s Meg’s MP in the next-door constituency).

Ali very kindly gave me two lovely Persephones – Elisabeth de Waal’s “Milton Place”, a previously unpublished novel set in a big house in the 1950s, and “The Second Persephone Book of Short Stories” which I’m sure will be as wonderful as the first one (reviewed here). Then my LibraryThing Virago Group secret santa gift, as well as including local soap and chocolate and the lovely Milton postcard pictured with a run-down of why she chose the books for me, had Daphne du Maurier’s “Jamaica Inn” (in the same edition as the copy of “Rebecca” I won from Ali during her Du Maurier reading week last week and allowing me to take part even more fully in 2020 than I was going to, and because I said I liked books from where the sender is from, and it was from Cornishgirl!), a copy of Willa Cather’s “My Antonia” which I’ve read but wished I owned, Rosamond Lehmann’s classic novel, “The Ballad and the Source” which I read YEARS ago and don’t own, and Margaret Kennedy’s “The Ladies of Lyndon”, the last in pre-loved Virago Green form and how I love adding my name to the names already written on the flyleaves.

I think the postcard’s message, “Solitude sometimes is best society” might have to be my 2020 motto if I’m not going to have TBR shelf overhand throughout the next year. But what a lovely pile and a lovely problem to have!

I’ve probably seen everyone else’s new book piles by now. Have you read any of these? Any bets as to when I’ll get to them?!