Got A Special Event With Your Significant Other? Why Not Trade Books

I, like anyone, love celebrating with my wife.

I love celebrating our Anniversaries, Valentines even Easter and everything in between.

But these events quickly get expensive with most peoples budgets at £20-£50 easily. When valentines rolled around and I was still working at a shoe shop Michael Kors were flying out the door at £100 a pair. Yikes!

Now I’m not totally unromantic.

It’s fun to mark special occasions in some way, I just think the way it’s done by a lot of people is wrong and really wasteful. More stuff you don’t need, presents you don’t like, even worse plastic junk that’s going to end up in the rubbish in a matter of weeks.

So we came up with the perfect solution.

A book.

Books are absolutely priceless, the things you can learn can change you forever and the stories you read can change the type of person you are. And finding someone a book they’ll like is a very personal affair, you have to know a lot about them to get the perfect book.

Even a book you don’t like or agree with can help you learn a lot, it helps you see a totally different worldview to your own and understand and appreciate how people different to you think. You don’t get that from a teddy with I Love You sewn into it.

It’s just an added bonus that you get all this for £10 (even less if you go to a charity shop!).

You can even set up rules. A book you’ve never read, your favourite book, something the other person would never normally chose to read themselves.

Doing this makes it even more interesting and leads to books I never thought of reading myself. My wife got me The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood for my birthday this year.

Phenomenal book!

I’m normally deep in the business, self-help or science fiction section of the bookshop so that’s a book I would never have gotten around too.

The only rule we stick with every time is finishing whatever you’re currently reading then start on their book next. That way you have to read it even if it’s one your not entirely sold on.

So why not try it?

Talk to your partner and get yourselves to the bookshop.