Giving the Gift of Reading 2018 edition #Blogmas

You should all know by now how much I love giving my friends and family books as gifts. I think I've talked about the books I've given as Christmas gifts every year Angie and I have had this blog, so let's continue the tradition.

We'll start with my friend Matt, well, one of the Matts anyway, there are two and they both got books from me this year haha. For the first Matt, I was placing an order at BookOutlet.ca and was also trying to cut back on the number of books I was buying. Book Outlet's prices are insanely cheap and in order to get free shipping you need to spend $45 minimum, which usually nets me 8 or 9 books, but I didn't want that many haha. So I asked Matt and our friend Mel if there was anything either of them wanted which got Matt and I discussing the books he's missing from his Stephen King collection. He mentioned he's been having a hard time tracking down an inexpensive copy of Cujo. Well, I went hunting and found a copy at The Book Depository that cost less than what Chapters or Amazo were selling it for, so that's what he got.

Mum and I also got some of the kids books for Christmas this year, but I can't remember which ones now and they're already wrapped up! That wasn't smart of me haha. There's a 5-minute stories Disney storybook collection, and a Disney bedtime story collection for the youngest one and then for one of the older ones there was a Star Wars DIY crafting book. I got my mum quite a few books for Christmas too. She's always complaining that she's run out of new books to read so she's rereading books she's read loads of times, so I always try and get her at least three new books for Christmas. This year I got her four. I got her two Max Hastings books, Das Reich : The March of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Through France, June 1944 and The Secret War : Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939-1945. She's a military history buff and apparently, Max Hastings is an award-winning writer in the genre (which is not a genre that is my personal forte). She seemed really excited about them both when she opened them. I the same vein I also got her The Railway Man by Eric Lomax, which is a memoir of one of the POWs who worked on the Burma-Siam Railway. The last book I got her was also nonfiction, but not military this time, she's also interested in reading about the Romanovs, so I got her The Race to Save the Romanovs: The Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue the Russian Imperial Family by Helen Rappaport. Which was only published this June, she didn't even know it existed yet so she was quite surprised to get it.

Then lastly there's the other Matt. He's a little tricky to buy for in that I'm never sure what he already had in his collections. See he's a big fan of both Batman and Doctor Who. He has pretty big collections of merch from both fandoms, so I like to add to his collections where I can by getting him things that he doesn't already have. My contribution this year to his Batman collection for Christmas was a rubber duck dressed as Batman. I was in the process of writing a sentence about how I think he'll feel about the duck and then he literally messaged me at that exact moment to tell me he and his wife opened their gifts so I don't have to speculate on what he thinks of the duck, I can just tell you. They really liked them :) (I got her an R2D2 kitchen timer because she loves cooking and baking and she collects Star Wars merch). Now to the book, I got him, that was for his Doctor Who collection. I was looking for Doctor Who merch on Etsy when I came across a store that sells used books and she had a small assortment of Doctor Who choose your own adventures from the 1980s. So, obviously I bought one, so my friend Matt is now the proud owner of a 32-year-old copy of Doctor Who: Mission to Venus.

Angie didn't get any books from me for Christmas this year because Amazon still hasn't made it so that you can buy people Kindle books as gifts! Come on Amazon, get your act together on that haha. I do have a book for her that I got from a used book fundraiser at the university I work at though, she knows about it and I'll be sending it along with her birthday gifts. Brenda Novak's Until You Loved Me.