As I waded through dense paragraphs of long, winding sentences filled with images of stars and waves and angels, of seagulls and silk and butterflies, of dreams and illusions and any other abstraction you can imagine, occasionally I felt angry—on a personal level—at what I took to be the book’s obstinacy, its willingness to reprise what it had said hundreds of times before, not to mention the seemingly endless detours that defy any obvious sense of structure. At other moments, I knew that I was immersed in something beautiful and strange, something too big to understand all at once.

Clara Peeters, "Stilleben mit Façon-de-Venise-Glas, Römer und einer Kerze (Still life with dainties, rosemary, wine, jewels and a burning candle)," 1607.

Barbara Cooney illustration for American Folk Songs for Christmas, via Honey and Wax Books.Antonia Pinter, "Szélanya," 2024. A History of Frogs.

 

The holiday season is careening toward culmination—candles lit, songs sung, gifts exchanged, a new calendar unwrapped—and as usual I don't feel ready.

(That's me above: the blockhead groping her way toward 2026.)

To steady myself, I like to look at my books, because they hold time differently. With stacks around me, I am rich in options: each book a door, each door a different future. And the books are patient, waiting for the moment when, for obscure reasons, I am ineluctably compelled to pick up the book a friend gave me three Christmases back or that one I bought for $.50 at a library sale, start reading, and feel my whole self electrified with thought and art.

(I tend to roll my eyes when people get breathy about BOOKS and WRITING and the POWER OF WORDS, but damn if it isn't true.)

Anyway, this is why I think books are the most exciting gifts. Here are a few I'd recommend.

For picture-book lookers, any age:

Any book by Tana Hoban, maker of the best photographic picture books. Hugh and I were particularly fond of Shapes, Shapes, Shapes, Is It Red? Is it Yellow? Is it Blue?, Is it Larger? Is It Smaller?, and Red, Blue, Yellow Shoe.

For bedtime-story listeners:

Giovanni Rodari's Telephone Tales: "Every night, at nine o’clock, wherever he is, Mr. Bianchi, an accountant who often travels for work, calls his daughter and tells her a bedtime story. Set in the 20th century era of pay phones, each story has to be told in the time that a single coin will buy."

Grace Lin's Where The Mountain Meets the Moon, the story of Minli, who leaves the Fruitless Valley to find the Old Man of the Moon.

For struggling artists:

Randall Jarrall's The Bat Poet, which Elizabeth Hardwick described as "a haunting little story, a parable of charming instruction—and of instructive charm." It tells of a bat who sees what other do not and has to learn what to do with that knowledge, gently dipping into questions of poetic meter, criticism, and craft.

Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows, the story of trying to realize a creative vision and how support can make all the difference. (More about it from me here.)

For anyone longing to draw the sun:

Bruno Munari's Drawing the Sun.

For lovers of November walks among tatter-leafed trees:

In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, excerpts from the writings of Henry David Thoreau, selected by Eliot Porter. Porter's quiet photographs of the natural world capture the stillness of ephemeral places in a way that pierces the soul. (There is a new edition by Chronicle, which is fine, but the original edition, designed by David Brower, is miles better.)



For museum wanderers:

John Berger's Portraits, a collection of essays about artists which in its scope and variety of forms is akin to wandering an expertly curated gallery of the mind.

For New Yorkers in exile:

The WPA Guide to New York City, a time-machine and teleportation device disguised as a book. Compiled and published in the 1930s as part of the New Deal effort to keep writers and artists employed, it captures the bones of the city as it was then, a skeleton still visible in many places, through capsule histories of neighborhoods, buildings, and services. (It is also how I discovered the amazing House-Number Key to Manhattan.)

For bourgeois anarchist cooks:

The transporting, mesmeric, fabulous, and maddening Honey From a Weed by Patience Gray. In her forties, the English-born Gray upended her comfortable life as a successful cookbook author to follow the sculptor Bernard Mommens to the Mediterranean. In his quest for stone, they lived in remote areas of Greece, Italy, and Spain, and Gray committed herself to rural life, absorbing and recording a dizzying array of culinary folkways. The book, published in the mid 1980s, is absolutely singular—reminisces of seasonal feasts and meetings with rare book collectors sandwich a chapter on anarchy—and crammed with a plethora of extremely specific, plainspoken recipes that range from the simple to the terrifyingly time-intensive. (One that requires poking the seeds out of grapes with a pin haunts me.) Gray's unsentimental admiration for the resourcefulness of the communities she lives in is obvious, and yet much of what she admires is a reality shaped by brutality—foraging less as a delightful diversion and more as a desperate need to make as many things as possible palatable.

Print out Angela Carter's 1987 LRB review, which digs into the uneasy question of Gray's privilege, as a side dish:

In the 1990s, activist, independent scholar, and artist Marcell Mars founded Memory of the World / Public Library amidst the ruins of the former Yugoslavia, with the aim of resisting the privatization of knowledge and encouraging everyone to freely share books online.

B09k’s poster work is a re-enactment of Mars’s Public Library manifesto,

“When everyone is a librarian, the library is everywhere,” inviting everyone to participate and become part of the world’s memory.

*