This month, the hosts of the #ShelfLove No Book Buying Challenge want us to share the best bookish gifts we’ve given or received.  While I was thinking about the various gifts I’ve gotten over the years, I realized that, with the exception of bookstore gift cards, my family doesn’t get me bookish gifts.  The Boyfriend and his family?  They’re considerably more thoughtful when it comes to gift giving.  It’s not that I don’t appreciate bookstore gift cards.  Oh, trust me, I do. The one my Mom got me for Christmas allowed me to get The Outlandish Companion, Vol. 1 by Diana Gabaldon (and several ebooks) without going against the No Book Buying Challenge.  However, gift cards don’t require much thought.

In the almost two years the Boyfriend and I have been together (our anniversary is next month! <3), I’ve received the following thoughtful and bookish gifts from him and his family:

This was half of my gift for our first anniversary.

This is the second half of my anniversary gift.  Though it’s not technically bookish, it replaced a computer chair that my best friend gave me, which was by that time completely worn out and beginning to cause me quite a bit of back pain.  There’s no way I would be able to get everything done for this blog and my college classes every day without this chair.

 

 

 

These are some of the stocking stuffer gifts that the Boyfriend’s Mom put in my Christmas stocking.

This is a metal Celtic bookmark that Pete, the Boyfriend’s Mom’s husband, gave me for Christmas.  Though he didn’t know it at the time, I had been eyeing bookmarks like this for awhile, but wouldn’t buy one because they cost about as much as a paperback.  He said he got it because every time he saw me, I was always reading.

 

 

Probably the best bookish gift I’ve ever gotten from anyone is my Kindle, which the Boyfriend got me for Christmas.  He also got me the USB power adapter, and that was the first gift from him that I opened.  You’ve never seen a girl get excited over an adapter unless you saw me when I realized it meant the other box was a Kindle.

The second best bookish gift is this Kindle cover, which anyone who loves Doctor Who will recognize as River Song’s journal.  I have the Best.Boyfriend.Ever.

For my Birthday last year, the Boyfriend got me these beautiful editions of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and The Arabian Nights.  He got me several other books as well, but these are special for two reasons.  One, he knows I love fairy tales, and two, I rarely ever buy myself hardcover editions despite having to stop myself from drooling over how substantial and permanent they look on the shelf.  Hardcovers say, “Here’s a private book collection to be passed down to future generations.”  My budget says, “That’s at least FIVE mass market paperbacks from the used bookstore.”

Though I haven’t pictured it here, one very thoughtful gift my Dad gave me for no other reason than he knows how much I love to read, but don’t have the money to buy books.  It’s a disc full of free ebooks.  I don’t count them in my TBR because there are too many books for me to read in a lifetime.  There are also a lot of genre books on the disc that I know I’ll never read.  However, I’ve discovered quite a few books on there that are great and I likely wouldn’t have found otherwise.

My BFF and I have gotten into the habit of gifting each other with books ever since she got in a scarily bad accident and was in the hospital with far too much time on her hands.  I immediately bought a tote bag full of books to keep her mind busy and got her hooked on a new series in the process.  Now she and her husband keep an ear open to the books I wish I could buy and get them for me for Birthdays and Christmases.  The most recent one was Seraphina by Rachel Hartman.  Somehow they managed to pick up a copy right in front of me without my seeing and then gave it to me when we were out of the store.  I’m pretty sure they’re secretly ninjas.