I don’t know about you, but lately I have seen a lot of youtubers having their husbands or their significant others in videos and I am loving it. I love seeing the support and love they share. It just makes me happy. They are always adorable, funny, and they always pick books for their significant other that they normally would not read or put off reading. This got me thinking.

I am a very avid reader, my boyfriend on the other hand is not. While he often takes me to the bookstore and spends time with me there, he never gets a book for himself. If he has I honestly don’t remember. Anyway, since seeing all those videos and such I became curious… what would my boyfriend pick out for me?

I was thinking about following suit and having him pick books from my owned tbr, but I started to think. I did not want to limit his choices because I wanted to see what he would pick when given an entire store. Also, if I had him pick from my owned tbr I wouldn’t be able to add to it. Lets be honest, I just wanted more books. lol. So about a month ago my boyfriend and I went to the bookstore and I gave him these guidelines.

1. You can pick 2-3 books
2. I have one veto

Then off he went walking through the store. I was very excited to see what he would pick, but at the same time I was anxious. Like I said previously my boyfriend is not much of a reader, but very supportive of my reading. When he is reading he is usually reading manga. When he has read in the past he enjoyed both The DaVinci Code and Angels & Demons by Dan Brown and Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z by Max Brooks.

With this in mind, he could either give me a book he loved or in the genre, try to find a book he think I might like, or both. It could go in any direction.

The First Pick

By Gaslight by Steven Price

London, 1885. In a city of fog and darkness, the notorious thief Edward Shade exists only as a ghost, a fabled con, a thief of other men’s futures — a man of smoke. William Pinkerton is already famous, the son of a brutal detective, when he descends into the underworld of Victorian London in pursuit of a new lead. His father died without ever tracing Shade; William, still reeling from his loss, is determined to drag the thief out of the shadows. Adam Foole is a gentleman without a past, haunted by a love affair ten years gone. When he receives a letter from his lost beloved, he returns to London in search of her; what he learns of her fate, and its connection to the man known as Shade, will force him to confront a grief he thought long-buried. What follows is a fog-enshrouded hunt through sewers, opium dens, drawing rooms, and seance halls. Above all, it is the story of the most unlikely of bonds: between William Pinkerton, the greatest detective of his age, and Adam Foole, the one man who may hold the key to finding Edward Shade.

Epic in scope, brilliantly conceived, and stunningly written, Steven Price’s By Gaslight is a riveting, atmospheric portrait of two men on the brink. Moving from the diamond mines of South Africa to the battlefields of the Civil War, the novel is a journey into a cityscape of grief, trust, and its breaking, where what we share can bind us even against our darker selves.

Second Pick

Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba

Light Yagami is an ace student with great prospects–and he’s bored out of his mind. But all that changes when he finds the Death Note, a notebook dropped by a rogue Shinigami death god. Any human whose name is written in the notebook dies, and now Light has vowed to use the power of the Death Note to rid the world of evil. But when criminals begin dropping dead, the authorities send the legendary detective L to track down the killer. With L hot on his heels, will Light lose sight of his noble goal…or his life?

Third Pick

Hiddensee by Gregory Maguire

Gregory Maguire returns with an inventive novel inspired by a timeless holiday legend, intertwining the story of the famous Nutcracker with the life of the mysterious toy maker named Drosselmeier who carves him.

Hiddensee: An island of white sandy beaches, salt marshes, steep cliffs, and pine forests north of Berlin in the Baltic Sea, an island that is an enchanting bohemian retreat and home to a large artists’ colony—a wellspring of inspiration for the Romantic imagination . . .

Having brought his legions of devoted readers to Oz in Wickedand to Wonderland in After Alice, Maguire now takes us to the realms of the Brothers Grimm and E. T. A. Hoffmann—the enchanted Black Forest of Bavaria and the salons of Munich. Hiddensee imagines the backstory of the Nutcracker, revealing how this entrancing creature came to be carved and how he guided an ailing girl named Klara through a dreamy paradise on a Christmas Eve. At the heart of Hoffmann’s mysterious tale hovers Godfather Drosselmeier—the ominous, canny, one-eyed toy maker made immortal by Petipa and Tchaikovsky’s fairy tale ballet—who presents the once and future Nutcracker to Klara, his goddaughter.

But Hiddensee is not just a retelling of a classic story. Maguire discovers in the flowering of German Romanticism ties to Hellenic mystery-cults—a fascination with death and the afterlife—and ponders a profound question: How can a person who is abused by life, shortchanged and challenged, nevertheless access secrets that benefit the disadvantaged and powerless? Ultimately, Hiddensee offers a message of hope. If the compromised Godfather Drosselmeier can bring an enchanted Nutcracker to a young girl in distress on a dark winter evening, perhaps everyone, however lonely or marginalized, has something precious to share.

I am so happy with the books that my boyfriend picked. I have read Vol. 1 and I am loving not only the story line, but the artwork as well. The story is something that really makes you think about what is right and what is wrong, but is also makes you think; “What would I do if this happened to me?” By Gaslight gives off Sherlock Holmes vibes, which is great because I love that detective, both the current BBC version and the classic novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hiddensee by Gregory Maguire was a book I kept picking up and putting down, so I was extremely happy when he picked it up. I have to say he did a great job, I couldn’t be happier. He is even saying that he has ideas for next time too. So maybe there will be a part two, who knows?

What do you think of his choices?

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