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?

I'd figured that you readers would know the true extent of my bibliomania if I honestly told you of all new arrivals, so I've been holding out on you. No longer. As I buy books, you'll hear about them. If it makes you think I'm afflicted with the Gentle Madness, congratulations; your thinking is right on target.

I paid a visit to one of my favorite specialty bookstores last week, Borderlands Books on Valencia Street in San Francisco. I enjoy shopping there because they have lots of signed books, lots of SF, fantasy and horror criticism, and lots of books from England that have either not been published here yet or never will.

The haul included Ramsey Campbell, Probably, a collection of 30 years of Campbell's essays and articles. The collection includes a number of pieces from the late lamented "Necrofile," a bi-monthly horror review (and one of those magazines you never want to be seen reading on the bus). It's signed and numbered, and a very welcome addition to my extensive criticism collection. God bless PS Publishing, which continues to put out wonderful stuff.

Next is Pearls From Peoria by Philip Jose Farmer, a thick volume of fiction and nonfiction written by one of the science fiction greats.

And then there's Mappa Mundi by Justina Robson, a young writer whose books have already met with incredible acclaim. It's a science fiction novel about nanotechnology, national security, mind control, and the notion of a radical shift in human identity. This book is publisher by Lou Anders's Pyr, an up and coming name in the SFnal publishing community. It's a beautifully made trade paperback, sturdy, heavy, with alkaline paper -- for those who love books as objects as well as for their content, this is one the best treats-for-the-eyes I've seen in trade paperback.

Because I'm a lawyer, I've had my eye out for Batton Lash's Tales of Supernatural Law. Comedy about lawyers is hard enough (and no, lawyer jokes don't count); make it a comic about lawyers representing Dracula and other creatures of the night, and you have something very silly and delightful.

James Lovegrove hasn't been published much in the States, so I was happy to find Worldstorm and Provender Gleed. They seem like books that are very different from one another, but which will give me the taste of the New Weird, which I love so much.

Eric Brown's A Writer's Life has been on my list for a long time because I love metafiction, and this book seems to hold a bunch of it. It's another signed and numbered book from PS Publishing.

Mark Budz's Idolon was there, too, signed -- a science fiction mystery, one of the hardest crossover of genres that can be done. Sounds cool.

Holly Phillips puzzled and pleased me in The Burning Girl, so I snatched up her small press book of short stories, In the Palace of Repose. Anything labeled "Dark Fantasy" is likely to appeal to me, especially in short stories (I tend to think horror usually works better in short form, notwithstanding Stephen King; heck, I even prefer his novellas and short stories to his novels, despite the fact that I enjoy falling into his longer works and not resurfacing for hours).

I have a decent collection of Arkham House books -- again with the publisher, I can hear you saying, but really, these specialty presses are becoming more and more important in this field. I picked up Michael Bishop's One Winter in Eden as my final purchase of the day. This book was first published in 1984, but except for some minor shelf wear it looks like it rolled off the presses yesterday. More short fiction, more promises of great reading.

I haven't been to a bookstore now in nearly a week, and I'm starting to get short of breath or something. Is there anything better in the world than buying an armful of books?

Two yummy new books landed on my doorstep today: Sebastian Faulks's latest offering, Human Traces, and a young adult fantasy by M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation.

Human Traces was an impulse buy after a viewing of the marvelous performances of Cate Blanchette, Billy Crudup and Michael Gambon in Charlotte Gray, the movie based on Faulks's novel of the same name. I'm like that: a lovely work in one medium can set me running for a related work in another medium, or a book by one author can set me hungering for another to whom he or she is often compared. I've not read any Faulks yet, but the tale the flap copy promises in Human Traces, a story of the origins of psychiatry, is one of perpetual fascination to me.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation looks even more fascinating, if in a completely different way. It's hard to resist this book based on the title alone, but the cover, depicting a boy whose face is in a contraption that reminds one of both Tycho Brahe's nose and Dumas's The Man in the Iron Mask, makes the book well nigh irresistible. When one learns that the book is not only about this boy, but also his mother, a princess in exile, and a house full of scholars -- well, this book has moved right to the top of my to-be-read pile. It doesn't hurt that the book itself, published by Candlewick Press, is lovely, with ragged edged pages, a very readable font, and a slightly larger than usual width. I'll let you know how it is.