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All I want for Christmas...

...is a bunch of books.

Or, putting it another way: My book wishlist for Christmas:

I feel the need to write something and I don’t have a book to review at hand, so I’m doing this list instead. I have left off the list the several cookbooks and foodie books I want, because I want to write about them over on Matarást, my other food blog (you’ll find a link on my profile page if you’re curious).
The reading report for November is in the making.

Not all of the books are new and the list is in no particular order of preference.

Here goes:

Jennifer Crusie & Bob Mayer: Agnes and the Hitman. I really liked the previous book by the Crusie/Mayer team and I expect I will like this one as well. The pairing of a romance with a thriller is not a new idea, but so often romance writers are not good at thrillers and thriller writers not good at romance, so having a romance writer and a thriller writer working together on a book makes sense, especially when they manage it as seamlessly as Crusie and Mayer.

A hardcover 3 volume edition of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. I made the mistake of lending my one-volume paperback edition to someone who doesn’t respect books and I got it back in horrible condition that has only gotten worse over several of my own re-readings of it. It has become obvious that this is a perennial read for me, so a longer-lasting hardcover edition is better than a soft cover one, and it’s a big book, so it makes sense to want 3 smaller volumes rather than one large one.

Peter Ackroyd: London: The Biography. I have read part of it and liked it, and want to finish it and have it available to dip into when the mood grabs me. Hardcover for preference, as it’s a big book and thick softcovers tend not to last long.

Neil Gaiman: Angels and Visitations, Smoke and Mirrors, Fragile Things, and the collected Sandman graphic novels. Gaiman is a master of the short story and I would love to own all of his short story collections, and his Sandman comics are just great.

Bella Bathurst: The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights, and Plundered Shipwrecks. I like reading about history, but not the sweeping kind. I prefer specific histories, such as biographies of persons, the history of specific places or things (like the spice trade or the East India Company), rather than the kind that covers whole countries and focuses on kings, politicians, famines and wars. If it’s about something that is usually not covered in the history textbooks, like domestic life or food or a little know expedition, that’s all the better, so this seems to be my kind of book.

Ella K. Maillart: Forbidden Journey. I have already read the “he said” part of this journey through Turkestan: Peter Fleming’s travel classic News from Tartary, and now I would like to read about it from Maillart’s point of view.

There are lots more, but these are the ones I could remember.
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