The Day After: My Haul in Books

Because I’m a book lover, I generally get many books for Christmas.  If not many, then at least a few.  This year, here’s what I ended up with.  It’s quite a diverse pile.

This is my favorite gift this year.  I squealed and hugged it when I opened it.  I also realize the advantages of having a blog.  It means that my husband, not much of a reader, now knows what to get me for Christmas and birthdays.  I’ve been raving about the beauty, goodness, and importance of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books all year now, so this is the perfect gift: a leather bound edition of the first five books in the series (Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy, Little House on the Prairie, On the Banks of Plum Creek, and By the Shores of Silver Lake) with the original Garth Williams illustrations.  My husband did “good.”

My husband also got me this beautiful book.  It’s a compilation of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey (which I haven’t yet read).  The Bronte sisters are a new-found love of mine in literature.  I had read Wuthering Heights as an undergraduate student in a humanities class, but I did not read Jane Eyre until this year and Agnes Grey is on my list for 2013.

I’m not yet sure where to display this book.  It has such nice lavender and greyish hues.  It may go well in my living room, which has those colors and these shelves:

My sisters and I decided to do a book exchange this year.  One sister and her husband got me this book:

I recently discovered Terry Tempest Williams with When Women Were Birds, which I wrote about on my blog this year, so I’m excited to read this one.  It’s about the experience of the author and her mother of being exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s.  Williams writes from the perspective of a Mormon, a feminist, and an environmentalist.  I look forward to seeing what I can learn from her experiences.

My other sister and her husband gave me two books.

This one looks fascinating.  I’ve always held strong opinions against these fundamentalist polygamist groups because of their control over and abuse of women and children.  It should solidify that opinion even more once I read this insider’s view of her experiences and her escape.

This may be the first book of this group that I read!  As most of you know, I am intensely interested in women’s issues, so learning about women in history appeals to me because of the “Great Silence” of half of the world’s population for so long.  Where are all of the women and how have they contributed to our cultures, histories, and technologies?  My sister knows what I like!

What books did you get as gifts during the holidays?