Bookish

I don’t remember if feeling so definitively wintry so early in the season in a long time. We had 3-4 inches of snow earlier this week, enough to take our first runs down the sledding hill yesterday. I walked up the street to the hill with AJ and The Boy Across the Street and stood at the top watching them go down and watching the sun set. The sledding hill is one of the best places for sunset viewing. You can see over the trees toward the horizon as it turns pink. You can see the moon rise. Eventually, I managed to snag a sled away from the boys and got in a few runs myself. Then we all trooped back to our house to warm up. This morning the sun was shining through cottony clouds, but the sky is looking heavy again. We’re supposed to be in for another 3-5 inches by tomorrow when the temperature drops into single digits. Snow. Cold. Winter.

The best part about winter at this time of year is that we have holidays to look forward to. AJ loves to get up and see what his advent calendars bring every morning. He has three, which is utterly ridiculous, but so it goes. One is a Playmobil advent calendar that he’s had since he was two. Another is the paper calendar my parents send him every year. The third, his favorite, is the one that my brother gave him with small gifts in each pocket. Yesterday he opened a miniature Rubik’s cube. “It’s one of those things,” he said, “where it lasts forever because you can’t stop.” I should have known the Rubik’s cube would be right up his alley. Unfortunately, there is no one in this house who can help him figure it out. We may need to send him to my friend J., mother of AJ’s friend Z and a cube champion in her youth, for some lessons.

Right now, though, the holidays are all about the pressure to get things done. A lot of people on my list are getting books this year, as in most years. Yesterday, Jeanne posted about the books she was giving this year: Nick Harkoway’s The Gone-Away World and Cory Doctorow’s parody of George Orwell’s 1984, Little Brother. I mentioned that I’m giving Rabih Allamedine’s The Hakawati and Christopher Benfrey’s The Summer of Hummingbirds: ve, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade . AJ is getting Rick Riordan’s latest, The Maze of Bones, the first in Scholastic’s new multi-authored 10-book series, The 39 Clues. I’m skeptical about this one because of the multimedia aspect (there is an interactive game on the web and with trading cards where readers compete for real prizes), but AJ and I both love Riordan’s Percy Jackson series and I’m sure AJ will love the trading cards and game, so I thought I’d give it a shot. We’ll post our review after Christmas.

So Jeanne and I are both interested: What books are you giving this Christmas? What makes a book a good gift book? Do you give the same books to a lot of different people or pick out books individually? Do you always give books you’ve read yourself, or are there occasions where you give something that you haven’t read?

For me, a good gift book is well-matched to the recipient and preferably is pretty to look at as well as a good read. But I do often give books to a lot of people if they are something really thought-provoking that I loved. The Hakawati is that kind of book, I think. Past books that I have given widely have included Gita Mehta’s The River Sutra, Reynolds Price’s Roxanna Slade, Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude and Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes in the Museum, all of which are among my all-time favorites. The Summer of Hummingbirds is a book I’m giving just to one person, whom I think will like it. And against my usual m.o., I have not yet read it myself, although I hope to get to it soon. Mr Spy, however, read it and recommended it highly, which is enough of a recommendation for me to pass it on to someone who is interested in the subject it covers. I am much more likely to give non-fiction books I’ve not read than I am to give fiction that I haven’t tried myself.

Consider this a meme and consider yourself tagged! Feel free to respond in the comments. If you’d prefer to answer in your own post, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a link in the comments here so I can see what you have to say.

And don’t feel obligated to focus on holiday giving. I’m interested in book gifts in general. Cranky, for instance, has a marvelous tendency to send me books randomly when she thinks I’d like them, a trait I admire greatly and wish I did more myself. I don’t wish to put words in her mouth, but it seems to me that she sends them for a couple of reasons: 1) because she thinks I’d like them (I always do) and 2) because she wants to talk about them with me. Those are, I think, my favorite reasons to give books too: partly altruistic, partly selfish.