Having always been an irregular blogger, I kind of skived blogging for the past few weeks in the hope of no one noticing. The reason for the momentary disappearance was my PhD defence, which took place last week. I’m pleased to report it went very well! It was an exhausting but wonderful day. I then spent the long May Day bank holiday weekend with Mr Liburuak relaxing in Berlin.

Anyway, I come back not only bearing a PhD, but also loads of books, and the potential for even more! So I think it’s only fair to share the book love with you, ladies and gents of the bookish variety.

First, Mr Liburuak brought me back an “order” from his Easter holiday in Bilbao. Bartleby y compañía by Enrique Vila-Matas had been on my wishlist for a while, and here it is!

Next up in the list of amazing bookish things that happened while I was incommunicado are the gifts I got after my defence. My University colleagues gave me a fab voucher to buy books for my e-reader, and my supervisor gave me a voucher for actual “physical” books. So I have a lot of book shopping to look forward to! Thanks to everyone!

Last week, when I was still in defence preparation land, it was St Jordi’s, aka World Book Day, and in good tradition we gave each other books – even though the buying and giving didn’t happen until we were in Berlin. I gave him a copy of Maus, by Art Spiegelman, and I got El camino by Miguel Delibes. I loved picking out a book for Mr Liburuak! He tends to read a lot of science-related books, so I jumped at the chance to buy him something different I knew he would enjoy. Plus, I’ll get to read it too!

But we didn’t stop there. Next up is our loot from St George’s bookshop, a wonderful English bookshop in my former ‘hood of Prenzlauer Berg, which I highly recommend to any book lovers from or visiting Berlin. It’s like paradise, seriously. In the next photo you can see the result of our visit to St George’s (the bottom four books).

I got Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht. The bottom two are his, of course.

All in all,  a successful week of book acquisition, I would say!

Have you acquired any new reads recently?