March is my birthday month, so of course, I bought some books. I also received some birthday money (ostensibly for books) which I surprisingly haven’t spent yet, so I’ll have a birthday-adjacent book haul sometime later on.

• Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
• All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie
• Cabo de Gata by Eugen Ruge, translated from the German by Anthea Bell
• Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle by Janet Todd
• Time Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land by Julia Blackman, illustrations by Enrique Brinkmann
• The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights by Anonymous, forward by Wen-chin Ouyang
• Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste by Nolan Gasser
• And the Ocean Was Our Sky by Patrick Ness, illustrated by Rovina Cai

I purchased these books from my local indie bookshop, my local used bookshop, and BookOutlet. They’re all books that I’ve been interested in reading for some time or were appealing in some way while I was browsing in the shops. I didn’t go nuts in my book buying this month because I 1) have a limited amount of shelf space and I don’t enjoy having piles of books sitting around my apartment, and 2) I haven’t had a major desire to go out and buy a bunch of books– or anything else for that matter. So while I certainly had the money to indulge myself, I simply haven’t. I think I will save my birthday money for new releases I’ve been looking forward to since they were announced. I may be hanging onto this money for months, and that’s okay.