In My Mailbox #11

Right then. Everybody, take a deep breath... and release. Calm yourself and prepare for the insane jealousy that will undoubtedly appear when I show you what finally arrived for my birthday. Are you ready? Then we'll begin..

It still makes me want to throw up in excitement when I look at it.

My birthday was right at the beginning of August, but I couldn't decide what I wanted and my Dad's been nagging me to decide for a month. Last week though, he remembered when I saw the above work of beauty in Waterstones before Christmas and offered to buy it for me for my birthday. It's a limited edition set of 1001 Tales of Arabian Nights by Penguin and I would willingly have given up my first-born child to own it.

And now it's miiiiiine! :D It arrived on Thursday in the heaviest Amazon box you've ever seen - the book set is heavier than a Playstation 3. It's a lot bigger than it looks in the photo too. And God, it's beautiful. Resisting the urge to stroke it and lick it is harder than you'd think.

Just to admit to my own stupidity... is it really bad that I was surprised when 1001 Tales of Arabian Nights actually contained, well... a thousand and one tales? :|

In other mailbox-related news, that I don't care about quite so much...

This is What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell. Obviously. I requested a swap for it on ReaditSwapit because it was on my wishlist, but now it's arrived I'm suddenly a lot less interested. I'll read it at some point, but I'm not desperate. Unless someone wants to tell me how amazing it is, of course...

Twelve was sent to me as part of the Transworld Reading Challenge. This is my third book (after Black Swan Rising and The Secrets Between Us) so only one left to go!

  
I'm convinced that the best charity shop in the entire world is in Shipley, West Yorkshire. It's one of those independant wildlife sanctuary ones and it's always full of quirky second-hand stuff and decorated with stuffed animal toys. It's cute. More importantly, every single book they have is either 50p or £1, depending on whether it's paperback or hardback. I mean, come on. Charity shops have gotten so expensive lately, so it's especially nice to find one like this.

I'm less impressed with the wall of occupied fish tanks that induce semi-panic attacks (I hate fish) but I can (almost) deal with that for 50p books.

I have a strange love for the little green Penguin paperbacks. They're almost cute somehow. I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea earlier in the year and loved it, so I snapped up Journey to the Centre of the Earth. It's a vaguely similar story by the same author, so why not?

As for the other one, I'm really interested in gender differences and how men and women are built to react, both biologically and sociologically. I know Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps is hardly the most scientific analysis out there, but it looks interesting and a bit of fun.