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For those of us who love reading, books are a deliciously rich gift for the holidays. To give or to get, old or new, long or short, it matters little. Books and readers are the perfect match. You’ve heard the old adage: A book is a gift that keeps on giving. That refers, of course, to the idea that books can be read time and time again. Below are stories about books as gifts, as well as the deeper gift of books: the connections they allow us to make with others. Some of the essays that follow are recommendations. Others simply testify to the power of reading. Either way, the stories are our gifts to you this season.
My own story about holiday giving spans two generations and typifies the modern blended family. One of my daughter’s favorite reading series as a child was Judy Blume’s books on the mischievous character Superfudge. Last year, we added a 4-year-old boy to our family – a step-grandson for me, a step-nephew for her. The boy is a reading prodigy if ever there was one: He started at age 2. My daughter, who turns 25 next month, noticed the way her new relative bobbled around getting into everyone’s business and making everyone, ultimately, fall for his charm. “He IS Superfudge,” she told me, and she bought him a boxed set of Blume’s series for Christmas. He devoured them. Twice. His mother called me the other day and put in a request for another tried-and-true recommendation this December. “I’m on it,” my daughter reported.
So it’s not just the words on pages that keep on giving. It’s the passing on of stories, dreams, lessons, joys, laughs and longings. We hope you enjoy the book reports below. Whether reviews or reveries, they encourage us to imagine and to participate in the power of books and the lives of those we love.
– Alicia Anstead
I read O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” as a child. I found the story of young lovers who sacrifice their treasures for the perfect gift so touching that my cousin and I devised a script and performed a play based on “Magi” at our annual family Christmas party. (We also used to go door-to-door, singing carols in exchange for chocolate and money, but that’s another story). We had fun with it, but neither of us took it seriously.
Fast-forward to 2003, and suddenly, I’m living it.
After an amazing summer – I got married last August and we bought our first house, a fixer-upper, last July – fall took a bit of a downturn. By November, the house was cold, Christmas was coming, and my husband and I were what some would call “house poor,” but what I prefer to call “broke.”
The holidays have always been a magical time in my life. I admit, I’ve always gone over the top with presents. And I always got the most joy watching my sweetie open the big gift of the year. Once, it was snowshoes. Another time, I wowed him with tickets to a Broadway show. Ironically, for one of our first Christmases together, I bought him a pocket watch, just like the one Jim sells to buy Della combs in the story. Each year I outdid myself, until I couldn’t.
When money is tight, things get interesting. I had visions of selling my hair (or my soul – to MasterCard) to buy him a trip to London or, say, a fob. Then it hit me: I needed to grow up. He didn’t need tickets to London. He needed me to snap out of my funk.
“Eight dollars a week or a million a year – what is the difference?” O. Henry’s narrator asks. The answer comes only in sharing your life with someone. It has nothing to do with money. It has everything to do with love and the vows we made to each other. Richer, poorer, better, worse. And that’s the real gift.
– Kristen Andresen
Wassail, wassail. And hot buttered rum, mulled wine and champagne punch. The holidays are rife with delectable invitations to imbibe – even traditional holiday foods like fruitcakes, soups and sweet potatoes are often laced with bourbon, brandy or other spirits.
For those abstaining from alcohol, the season may loom as a special challenge to sobriety. That’s why Liz Scott’s “The Sober Kitchen” is high on my list of gifts for friends who have, for one reason or another, sworn off the sauce.
Scott, an alcoholic in recovery and a professional chef, understands that for confirmed foodies and passionate cooks the prospect of living without alcohol may be especially daunting. She has also thought long and hard about the role healthful foods play in restoring the ravaged bodies and weary souls of longtime substance abusers.
The result is this big, fat, enticing cookbook and meal planner. The volume offers hundreds of recipes as well as well-placed bits of Scott’s empathetic wisdom and support. For armchair cooks, it’s a newsy, idea-packed, reassuring read.
Scott rejects the popular notion that spirits used in cooking somehow “burn off.” She uses her kitchen smarts instead to rework some boozy old favorites like Chicken Marsala, Beer-Battered Shrimp and Black Forest Cake into yummy, elegant, alcohol-free versions.
But the real message is that there’s no need to be stuck in that rut anyway. Scott’s best recipes rely on fresh, whole ingredients and many are personal spins on familiar favorites. My family especially enjoyed her comforting Potato and Caramelized Onion Tart and a simple Filet of Sole with Grapes and Fresh Tarragon.
Your abstinent foodie friends won’t care that “The Sober Kitchen” garnered praise this year from the Research Society on Alcoholism and other health-related groups. They’ll be too busy cooking and eating and thanking you for your thoughtful and supportive gift.
– Meg Haskell
“Tales of Cedar River” by William M. Clark chronicles life in a fictional town as real as any Maine town you know. A sort of Lake Wobegon meets Maine – not the way life should be, but the way it was 50 years ago, and, essentially, the way it is today.
Scratch the surface of any small town in Maine and you will still find the folks of Cedar River, respectable citizens, rapscallions and reprobates; saints, sinners and shiftless skunks. And often, it’s hard to tell which is which. Folks in Cedar River appreciate that ambiguity.
The tales are funny, told with affectionate humor, and include the sagas of the moose that slides down a ledge into Uncle Oscar’s still; of Mrs. Kelly, the hamfisted teacher who pounds knowledge into her pupils’ heads; and of the Gages, who never buy something they can steal from a friend.
Written by a man who took care with his words and who clearly loved Maine – the late Clark was born in Caratunk and was a columnist in Portland – the book is ideal for anyone with similar affections, or, really, for anyone who enjoys a good yarn.
My copy of the book was printed in 1960, and I bought it at a used bookstore – my favorite place to find a gift for true book lovers. It is also available online. My books are my friends, and visiting a used bookstore is like going to your high school reunion. You can visit with your best friends, become reacquainted and, with luck, discover those you missed the first time around.
It’s a good thing.
– Rich Hewitt
Fifteen minutes before a recent bedtime – mine; the children stay up until all hours – 6-year-old Peter asked me to read to him and, as I was relaxing before the wood stove, I thought it best that he begin that very night to take responsibility for finding his evening story. He returned a moment later with “Awful Ogre’s Awful Day” by Jack Prelutsky.
I hadn’t read it before, but I had read enough of Prelutsky’s other verse collections to know the boy’s taste in books was commendable – No Child Left Behind must be working, or something. We sat on the floor together and began with “Awful Ogre Rises,” or we almost began because first we admired Paul O. Zelinsky’s splendid and drippingly nasty ogre drawings. Then we began:
My rattlesnake awakens me,
I swat its scaly head.
My buzzard pecks my belly
Till I fling it from the bed.
When Peter tried parts of poems, his voice was free of that new-reader affect disorder. The syllables carried themselves properly, and he was pleased to hear the improvement.
His older brother, 9-year-old Will, sat nearby on the couch, lost in his own book until we arrived at Awful Ogre’s breakfast:
You’re the meal I savor most
I sip a bit of gargoyle bile
and chew some ghoul on toast.
What was gargoyle bile? Will wanted to know, hoping it would be gross. As he slid down next to us, I assured him it was what he’d be getting in his lunch tomorrow.
On we went with Awful Ogre’s day, one child on each side of me, or, more to the point, on each side of the book; the stove making the room as snug as an ogres reunion. Peter enjoyed the rhymes and story; Will appreciated them, too, while looking for new words. Prelutsky supplied all in abundance.
For different reasons, we all liked the four-line, “Awful Ogre Speaks of Stature”:
When elves and gnomes encounter me,
They often shriek, “Grotesque!”
I bow with magnanimity
And murmur, “Statuesque.”
“What’s ‘statuesque’?” Will asked. “What’s that coming out of the ogre’s nose?” Peter asked. What’s making their father so content? you might have asked.
– Todd Benoit
The LeDucs put me on to “Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book” that, with annual updates, means you can give someone the same book every year and have it always be appreciated.
It’s priced at $14.95, but it’s available for $10.17 on amazon.com. Either price works for me, whether I come across it last-minute in a bookstore or plan ahead and order online. For a few years I even bought a second copy for myself when I was buying one for Brian LeDuc, my brother-in-law.
Brian’s great with wine, but his dad, Larry LeDuc, is the real connoisseur in the family. He discovered the “Hugh Johnson” series in 1977, its first year. Larry, a University of Toronto professor, has a British colleague who is a neighbor of Hugh Johnson. That makes following Johnson’s career even more fun each Christmas.
“Hugh Johnson compacted everything in the world of wine,” Larry elaborated as we sipped glasses of a 2002 Rosso Zinfandel over Thanksgiving dinner. “At a time when wine was being described in coffee table books and encyclopedias, Hugh Johnson made it simple.”
True pocket size, it’s easy to take along to the wine store when you have your dinner-party meal in mind. Brian does that. When a bottle strikes your interest, you can look it up and see if it’s a match, however unknown to you or whatever country or region its origin.
Brian also converted a Canadian couple, lifelong Molson drinkers, into wine aficionados with this book. His gift to them one Christmas was the book, plus a case of wine he chose carefully, each bottle coming in under $15. By year’s end, the pair had become as wine-loving as the LeDucs.
– Katherine Cassidy
I will never unwrap and hold the books I would like to receive.
They do not exist.
If they did, I would sit for hours sifting through yellowed pages, absorbed in uneven scrawl and broken sentences. I would read of mundane daily happenings, momentous occasions and perhaps learn a few deeply buried family secrets.
These books that I would treasure so much are the never-written journals of my grandmothers and my mother.
I have purchased many journals for the young women in my family. The books are beautiful in their simplicity, my own words of encouragement written inside the cover. Sadly, I suspect they remain empty today. Is it possible that their own children and grandchildren will share my unrequited longing for connection?
Those who don’t write in journals feel they are either too busy or have nothing important to say. I understand as one who has an on-and-off relationship with my own.
Those who are blessed with the journals of their friends or family, however, know that the most interesting reading is found in the most ordinary of events.
A journal is a deeply personal record, meant only for the eyes of the writer – for now. But someday it could become a truly priceless treasure for others.
To me the greatest book begins with no words at all. It’s one that you fill with your own.
– Renee Ordway
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