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 There are the literary classics they tell you about in school - and then there are the more personal classics that all passionate readers designate for themselves, whether the world has heard about them or not. Listed below are some old favorites that nine Seattle-area writers cited as books they'd choose to give someone this holiday season, along with some enticing new titles:
author of "Treasures in Heaven": "I am reading James Welch's `The Heart Song of Charging Elk' (Doubleday, $24.95) and think it would be a good gift book for quite a few people. It is the vivid story of an indien rouge with the Buffalo Bill Show who is left behind in 1890s Marseilles. Regarded as an exotic outsider by the French, he becomes the victim of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Only faith in his eventual return to America sustains Charging Elk through the loneliness of his exile. As for that big square spot under my Christmas tree, I am saving it for Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher's two-volume `African Ceremonies' (Abrams, $150). It is a photographic documentation compiled over 10 years by two women determined to preserve these rich cultures."
author of "My Grandfather's House: A Genealogy of Doubt and Faith": "I've been pressing two books in particular on everyone I know for the better part of this year, and they'll doubtless figure in my Christmas giving: First, Charles Baxter's stunning `The Feast of Love' (Pantheon, $24), this year's standout novel as far as I'm concerned; second, Patricia Hampl's `I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory' (Norton, $13), a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination that is a collection of essays on art, history, spirituality, and their relation to memory that is so much more than a mere collection."Alan Chong Lau, author of "Blues & Greens - A Produce Worker's Journal": "Photographer Sean Kernan's `The Secret Books' (Leete's Island Books, $35) is a haunting black-and-white visual response to the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. I held it in my hands only long enough to wrap it and send it off as a gift. Still, one feels the images evoked by the camera merging with the Argentine master of words in a seamless marriage that takes your mind on a cinematic journey across the subconscious. That same rich gradation of sorrow across desolate landscape appears in Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase's `The Solitude of Ravens' (Bedford Arts Publishers, out of print), one man's midlife journey across a snowy terrain inhabited by darkness and light."
author of "The Strangeness of Beauty": "During a summer visit, my mother picked up my boxed set of Art Spiegelman's two-volume `Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History/Here My Troubles Began' (Pantheon, $28). Upon completing it, she immediately came - tear-filled, wadded-up tissues still in hand - and asked me to give her a set as a New Year's gift. After observing the arresting cover illustrations and his grandmother's absorption in the tale, my 11-year-old son also read them and proclaimed them to be `very sad but very very good,' and stated that they left him feeling `well, definitely not happy, but kind of quiet and thinking and OK.' And so, as a gift to families containing readers of all generations, I recommend `Maus,' Art Spielgelman's darkness-defying novel of the Holocaust and family love, told through the brilliantly paradoxical form of a cartoon."
author of "Walking the High Ridge: Life as Field Trip": "A gift I would love to give any reader would be a bow-tied bundle of three little British books: `Cold Comfort Farm' by Stella Gibbons (Penguin, $11.95), the tartest, funniest picture of the urban-rural gulf I've ever read; `The Wind in the Willows' by Kenneth Grahame (available in various editions, including an Oxford University Press paperback, $6.95), as fresh as ever and as delightful to parents as to their toad-and-otter loving children; and `Gate of Angels' by Penelope Fitzgerald (Mariner, $12), or any title by her; she makes richer novels out of fewer words than any modern writer I know."
author of "Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings": "If anyone has not yet read Evelyn Waugh's `A Handful of Dust' (Little, Brown, $13) they have missed the funniest, driest, darkest and the most musically well-written book of the 20th century. Of more recent books, the two-volume biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw - `Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris' (Norton, $21.95) and `Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis' (Norton, $35) - is a mountainous piece, not well written, but necessary reading. If one wants to know how that man shaped the 20th century to his own design, that's the book."
author of "Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season": "I'd say Geoff Dyer's `Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence' (North Point, $13) - a book that starts out being about D.H. Lawrence, gets lost in Geoff Dyer, and winds up being about D.H. Lawrence. A beautiful book about transforming melancholy into passion - sounds like a holiday necessity to me."
author of "Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers Who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America": "I would recommend two books: Thomas Berger's `Little Big Man' (Delacorte, $13.95) and his last book (he has just retired from the literary life), `The Return of Little Big Man' (Back Bay, $13.95), which comprise an extraordinarily moving and funny rumination on the American nation by one of his generation's most gifted and important novelists."
author of "The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists": "I'd happily give `The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred' by Phil Cousineau (Conari, $16.95) to any traveler. In an age of mass tourism, Cousineau is less an advocate for expensive trips to ever-more remote places to get away from the crowds, than he is a poet with advice on how to learn to go deeper and see more fully everywhere we go. Another gift I'd consider for a friend making a long journey by air or car would be the audiobook of Seamus Heaney reading his new translation of `Beowulf' (Highbridge, $18.95 on cassette, $24.95 on CD). How much different and how much more wonderful his rendering of this Old English text sounds than what I remember from school. |
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