Birthdays Are Book Days

It's that time again. Another year older (which I'm trying not to think about) and something that goes hand-in-hand with birthdays for me - a cornucopia of new books. As far back as I can remember, if people were stuck for a present for me, they just got me a book and I never complained. I recall car journeys to the coast on birthdays with my nose more in a new book than bothered about sniffing the sea air. Don't worry, I eventually put it down and did kid stuff but the point is that birthdays and books are entwined in my head.

I went to York for a few days and went a little crazy in the book department. It's easy to be free with someone else's money but this is my York haul:

Three shops contributed to that. I've been meaning to read Brody's Kate Shackleton series from the beginning since I read A Woman Unknown (reviewed here) over a year ago but I'd got it into my head that I wanted to buy it from a 'proper' bookshop in Yorkshire and, being too dippy to order it in, I was waiting until I found it. Looking forward to that one immensely. The Stella Gibbons book will be the fourth of hers that I've read (and still haven't touched Cold Comfort Farm) and, although the last one I read was a little odd, I do have high hopes for this one. As for Jude the Obscure... Well, I might give that a wide berth for a while. I want to read it but Hardy tends to emotionally break me. 

Now the non-fiction. Out of the five, Dickens and the Artists is probably the most intriguing and the prettiest. Dickens and the Social Order might be put off until I've read two of the novels it discusses but it was too good a deal to ignore and, while I've heard mixed things about the Collins biography, I couldn't really pass that up either. The Virginia Woolf book, although small, is notable for the illustrations so that should be good and as for Yorkshire's Murderous Women... Can I just point out that until I started studying sensation fiction my interest in gruesome historical murders was almost nil? I think we can blame Edmund Yates and Wilkie Collins for that one. 

There's one other book to mention, a present from a good friend who aims to aid my procrastination by giving me books like this: 

She knows me so well.

Here, have Audrey Hepburn singing (with her real, charming voice) in a bookshop in Funny Face: