Get Any Good Books For Christmas?

I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas, and were showered with wonderful book presents. I would love to hear waht you got.

This year we are visiting friends in Canada and so I have not been able to open many of my presents - before we left just seemed too soon! Christmas has therefore so far been much more of a time for giving this year, and I have spoiled my godson and his brothers rotten with books - my hand luggage for the flight was a small case filled with books. I gave Max, my godson, the first six CHERUB books my Robert Muchamore, as well as the first TimeRiders book, Justin Thyme by Panama Oxridge, and Leviathan and Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld. Frank, his ten year old brother who is more into fantasy stories, was the recipient of the first five books in Michael Scott's Secrets of Nicholas Flamel series and The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. Spike is the next one down and he is only seven, and only just getting into reading, so I gave him a selection of some of the best books for his age group that have been released in the UK over the past year or so.

Me? Like I said, I have not had the chance to open many presents yet, but I was allowed to open two before we came away. The first was recommended to me by Mark de Jager over at My Favourite Books, and is The Walking Dead Compendium Vol 1. I love the TV show and Mark said I HAD to read the graphic novel, and so this shot straight to the top of my Christmas wish list. 1000+ pages of glorious black and white zombie saga.

The other pesent I opened turned out to be a book that I thought I would never own (as it is rather expensive), but I put it on my wish list and nearly fell over when my wife gave it to me. It is called 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking and is published by Taschen. This one had to be opened before we came away as it was far too big to bring with us - it is huge (that's me holding it in the photo below)! It measures 11.4 inches wide by 15.6 inches high, and is filled with more than 700 pages, printed on thick high quality stock. I on;y had a short amount of time to flick through it before we came away but it is stunningly beautiful - my only dilemma is that it is so heavy that I'm not sure on the best way to read it :-) I have included some images from its contents below, courtesy of the Taschen website.