For years and years my family steadfastly refused to buy me books for Christmas. Even in those years when I headed my list with the words, "I'd like nothing more than to bring home a suitcase full of books," I'd receive none. Of course, it's a bit scary trying to buy me books, given my enormous library. And no one in the family -- and many outside of the family -- understands why I need more books when I already have too many. They just don't get it.

Since I married my husband, a fellow booklover, five years ago, I get books for Christmas from at least one source. His main two gifts this year from me were signed first editions of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and John Darnton's The Darwin Conspiracy. In return, I received from him a first edition of Julie Phillips's James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon and a copy of Tiptree's Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. In our bookish family of two, these are prizes indeed.

My extended family has gotten better about getting me books since we went to a grab-bag system. This year I got a couple of paperbacks that I've been longing for, Kate Atkinson's literary mystery Case Histories and Donna Leon's Uniform Justice.

From there it was on to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association and its marvelous exhibit hall. I saw so many books the first day that I genuinely regretted not having brought an extra suitcase -- copies of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Robert Fagles new translation of Virgil's The Aeneid for only $10, for instance. But I held out until the last day, when the exhibitors want to unload their display copies rather than hauling them back to the publishing house, and I picked up three books for $3, the best I've ever done. The haul: Alice Hoffman's Blackbird House, Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor (appropriate since I had severe PhD envy after attending MLA sessions), and a galley of Joan Acocella's forthcoming book, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays, which looks fascinating. My husband picked up this and that, too, which meant that our luggage was substantially heavier on the way home than it had been on the way out.

Our mail finally showed up today after reposing at the post office for several extra days, as someone had forgotten to resume our service. Lots of yummy science fiction and fantasy awaiting my perusal: Jim Grimsley's The Last Green Tree; S.M. Stirling's The Sky People; Steven Erickson's fifth book in his series, The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Midnight Tides; Kathleen Ann Goonan's newest after a fairly long silence, In War Times; and a first novel by Sandra McDonald, The Outback Stars.

If you think all these new riches mean I'll be doing a lot of reading in early 2007, you're right. Nothing is as exciting as a big pile of new books -- except reading them.

What did you get for your holiday?