Buy Books for the Holidays (or not)

My Friend Amy set up a new blog/initiative last month that several others have been promoting lately: Buy Books for the Holidays. Now, I am not one to moralize on how people ought to read more, and books are better for you than TV or movies, nor on what kinds of businesses it’s right or wrong to support. (Well, that last thing I do, but I keep it off the blog.)

That said, the publishing and bookselling industries are clearly in a tough spot (along with a lot of others, of course), and IFF you care about books and publishing, and IFF you want to support these businesses (and hopefully IFF your designated gift recipients like books too), then you should do so, and vote with your wallet, and buy books for the holidays.

Personally, I prefer to give books-as-objects (as I’ve mentioned before), for a few reasons:

• I don’t like to give copies of my recent favorite novels around, pushing them on my friends and family.
• It’s hard to pick out something the recipient is interested in and will enjoy—these things are such a matter of personal taste, it can be a real gamble.
• Most importantly, so few people feel like they can buy books-as-objects for themselves. I believe in giving as a gift something the person wouldn’t actually buy himself, and relatively few people will treat themselves to something purely funny, silly, or a fine edition of something they’ve already got.

So my favorite gift books are humorous, or coffee table books, or cookbooks, or stumbled-upon old illustrated editions of classics, etc. For example:

Last year, my best friend got a copy of Mafia: The Government’s Secret File on Organized Crime, which reads like a dossier of mob figures, and I think it was a pretty good success.

I’m also a big fan of Ben Schott and his miscellanies and almanacs. Fun and uselessly informative (is there a difference?). (For the fun and uselessly uninformative, John Hodgman has a new one this holiday season, More Information Than You Require. I loved his last one.)

Also on the humor side: I’ve got two little numbers from Tow Books, an imprint started by a McSweeney’s veteran, that are very funny in, you know, that way. Oh, the Humanity!: A Gentle Guide to Social Interaction for the Feeble Young Introvert by Jason Roeder and Everything Is Wrong with You: The Modern Woman’s Guide to Finding Self Confidence Through Self Loathing by Wendy Molyneux would be good for the young hipster who appreciates self-help parody. Seriously though, they are funny.

For more, uh, literary humor, I am still in love with They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books. Yes, they are real. Yes, that is scary. Unfortunately I don’t actually have this, but if I did I could quote you…pretty much the whole thing.

Black: The History of a Color would also make a great gift for the right person, as would an anthology like State by State.

Last year, or the year before, my grandparents made out with The Silver Spoon, the Italian cooking bible. I wish I had it for myself.

And for those with $500 to drop on something seriously weird and risqué (okay, it’s not risqué, it’s pretty much pornography, so don’t click through if you don’t want to see a hot naked woman), you should totally get The Book of Olga, which Taschen describes as “French photographer Bettina Rheims’s sexiest book ever: daring portraits of a gorgeous woman commissioned by her millionaire husband. …both a love song and an artistic statement.”

Those are a few of my favorite (gifting) things. If anyone wants to buy me something, well, who wouldn’t love (someone else to buy her) a $195 copy of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language?