2009 LaNew-Yorkaise.com Book Gift Guide
Still looking for last-minute gifts? Here’s a quick rundown of some LaNew-Yorkaise favorites. Happy holidays!
Biz,
LaNew-Yorkaise
Books for the aspiring writer:
Classic Reference:
The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
A reference book for grammar and style of which Charles Osgood wrote “still a little book, small enough and important enough to carry in your pocket, as I carry mine.”
Why it’s a great gift: a standard for parents sending children off to college, or colleagues off to grad school, this book on style just never seems to go out of style.
Classic Guide:
The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick
The Situation and the Story is a guide to creating personal narrative with an unusual premise: it shows the reader how to write by first re-learning how to read.
Why it’s a great gift: It makes the “how-to” book on writing come alive, and will get your aspiring author friend out of the winter doldrums-inspired writer’s block and into major writing territory.
Offbeat:
The Autobiographer’s Handbook: The 826 National Guide to Writing Your Memoir edited by Jennifer Traig with an introduction by Dave Eggers
“The contemporary masters of memoir”—Jonathan Ames, Ishmael Beah, Elizabeth Gilbert, Nick Hornby, Frank McCourt, Maxine Hong Kingston, Art Spiegelman, Tobias Wolff and others—reveal their strategies and advice on writing.
Why it’s a great gift: it’s like sitting in on the brilliant conversation of the people the aspiring writer wants to be.
Coffee table:
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Seventeenth Edition, Edited by John Bartlett and Justin Kaplan.
The first version of this classic tome came out in 1855, and has been continuously in print since then, helping writers, readers, and lovers of knowledge look smarter since, well, 1855.
The new edition has over 25,00 quotations from everyone from Bill Clinton to Lucretius. It’s searchable by author and topic, so readers can search for wisdom from some of their favorite authors or finally figure out who said that great sentence about kings being like stars (Shelley).
Why it’s a great gift: Your friend will love you for making them look so brilliant at the next cocktail party/adding such a perfect epitaph to their new novel.
The Susan Sontag Fan:
Classic:
This is Sontag’s National Book Award-winning novel that follows a Polish actress and her admirers across America in the early 1900s, creating a glimpse into turn-of-the-century Manhattan and San Francisco as well as the silver mines of Virginia City, Nevada, and everyplace in between.
Why it’s a great gift: The prose is exquisite, and it has one of the most original opening and closing scenes in modern literature
Classic Nonfiction:
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
This is Sontag’s first collection of essays, containing the liberal art education staple “Against Interpretation” as well as discussions on Sartre, Godard, Beckett, and science fiction films, among other topics.
Why it’s a great gift: It’s a timeless collection with serious weight as cultural capital.
For Serious Fans Who have Read Everything Else:
This collection of eight stories covers everything from a good wife who gets in the clutches of a nymphomaniac to the experimental “Project for a Trip to China,” replete with laundry lists of “Chinese equivalences” and quotes from The Great Gatsby.
Why it’s a great gift: It’s early Sontag, and shows the incredible range the essayist, novelist, and critic was truly capable of creating.
The Francophile:
Cynic blogger/ Modern Girl Tired of Parisian Love Stories:
Petite Anglaise by Catherine Sanderson
The true story of “Petite Anglaise,” a female Brit and blogger living in Paris and writing about life with her French husband and young child. Her depiction of being a Brit amongst frogs is both humorous and real; her vulnerability and genuine affection for all things French come through on every page
Why it’s a great gift: She’s a blogger who turned personal pain into a book deal.
The Lover of French food:
My Life in France by Julia Child
Julia Child had a great marriage, a great passion for life, and a larger-than-life passion for travel and cooking. This is her account of some of her best years in France.
Why it’s a great gift: With the popularity of the film “Julie & Julia” this year, this book has come back in a big way, but longtime fans of her recipes will find much to love in her personal writing.
Classics:
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway’s memoir of Paris in the 1920s, bursting with expatriate characters like Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the novel that captures the spirit of post-World War I Paris.
Why it’s a great gift: It is the book on Paris.
Modern Classic:
Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
Suffused with both humor and keen observations on French culture (where do Parisians hide their gyms?), Gopnik’s story is not only the account of an expatriate writer’s literary observations, but a story of parenting abroad, allowing the gifted writer to explore the City of Light simultaneously through his own, seasoned journalist’s eye and the eyes of a child.
Why it’s a great gift: Gopnik brings Paris wholly and realistically to life, and will remind you of what is best about living in another country.
Humor:
Paris France by Gertrude Stein
Published in 1940 on the day that Paris fell to the Germans, this defiant, funny, and blunt book by the unconventional Stein delights with its observations on cats, her childhood, and the Frenchness of the French.
Why it’s a great gift: Stein’s wordplay is always a pleasure in smaller doses, and this slim volume both celebrates and pokes fun at the French
Coffee Table:
My French Life by Vicki Archer
Lushly illustrated with photographs by Carla Coulson, this picture book tells the story of a woman falling in love with Provence, and her observations and discoveries as the house she purchases for her family becomes a home.
My French Life is full of photos of devastatingly beautiful lilac fields and olive trees, French fabrics and textured lingerie, and astounding views of both urban Paris and the mountain ranges and windy roads of Provence.
Why it’s a great gift: It’s the next best thing to owning and redecorating a villa in Provence, and it costs a hell of a lot less.
An Homage to John Updike:
With the passing of Updike in 2009, what better way to remember his prolific talent than by hand selecting some of his gems as a gift to help new readers discover his genius? The selections below, with the exception of Rabbit, Run, were all given to me by a dear friend who knew I liked Updike, but wanted to present me with books I probably didn’t own. Well done, Rahim!
Classic:
Rabbit, Run tells the story of Rabbit Angstrom, an ex-high school basketball star-turned-husband-and-salesman who tries to run from the banality of his life while pleasing everyone around him—wife, lover, preacher, old-timer coach—and finds it to be an impossible task.
Why it’s a great gift: Updike’s prose is impossibly true to life: a beating heart, a slick of pavement, the feeling you get when you watch someone younger than you enjoying an age that you once were—it’s all here.
For the Reader who has everything else:
Problems and other stories (1972)
This collection of short stories covers everything from a family man’s encounter with a prostitute to the banality of board meetings to a daughter that runs off with a red-bearded harpsichord-maker whose last request of her parents is to learn how to jitterbug.
Why it’s a great gift: incredible range, unforgettable characters, all conveyed in stories spaced to last a single subway ride.
For the reader who normally wouldn’t pick up Updike:
A 20th century Tristan and Isolde, Brazil takes a couple from their meeting on a Copacabana beach in the 1960s through 22 years of a tumultuous relationship, exploring cultural and racial perceptions.
Why it’s a great gift: In Updike’s hands, the classic story of poor boy meets rich girl is turned into something that transcends genre. The lovemaking scenes are also incredibly hot.
See you in 2010!
