I hate gift guides.
They all seem to feature the same items. Every year the lists get an update, but really it’s just some new version of the thing on the list the year before. Who needs another expensive candle you’re too afraid to light because it cost $200 and only burns for four hours? I don’t need any of the small but expensive trinkets, especially the leather ones or the watches.
I should mention that the act of opening presents mortifies me. The anxiety and over-thinking about how I should act and if my reaction is appropriate (never is) makes me want to vomit. So, I won’t be including my selections (this time).
In lieu of doing a guide or even some sort of post that drives traffic because it games some search algorithm or its SEO is so good it can’t be resisted, I decided to ask some friends about the best books they’ve ever been gifted. This isn’t a list for you to go out and buy these books, although that would be cool, but I hope it gets you thinking about the kinds of books you love and why you love them.
There is a Bookshop.org shop with all of the selections for you to peruse too. Yes, it is an affiliated link and this newsletter will get some small monetary gain from you clicking and purchasing these books. But, again, that’s not the goal. Instead, I hope these lists inspire you to think about the best books you got or gave out as gifts. At the time, I anticipate this will stir some memories of the best books you ever got.
Caroline Moss
In 2009 my first boss gifted me a YA fiction book that she said changed her life. 24 hours later I could safely say “Elsewhere” by Gabrielle Zevin also changed mine. Nearly 15 years later and I still buy it for anyone who has lost someone they love, especially if they aren’t religious or woo woo spiritual. I reread it every year and hold onto its story through seasons of grief.
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
When my aunt gave me her copy of Lonesome Dove when I was in 10th grade I felt like it was the first time I was was being acknowledged as a reader and with that I took reading it seriously. It was the first “real” book with adult themes that I read outside of school curriculum and it made me want to live in the library and read everything I could. Now I give a copy to the young people in my life.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P by Adelle Waldman
A delicious page-turner that I think everyone should read, whether your friends were trying to infiltrate the New York literary cognoscenti in the late aughts or you’re just thankful they weren’t. Reading it is like watching an episode of HBO’s GIRLS (in the best way). Perfect for a college grad or someone in their 30s who missed reading it the first time around.
Caroline Moss is the author of five books, including Hey Ladies! She wrote and edited some blogs and newspapers and has suffered through the ups-and-downs of the media world for 15 years. She now gives recommendations at Gee Thanks, Just Bought It! which she started 4 years ago to make her shopping addiction seem more business-like.
Molly Starr
Wasted came out in the Reviving Ophelia era of nonfiction about young women that, to me, pushed tragedies and lurid details over quality of writing. Frankly I ignored Wasted because I figured it was just that, but my best friend counted it a favorite and gave me a copy. What I found is that Hornbacher's memoir is a haunting, accomplished work of true literary merit. She captures the twisted logic of eating disorders, their allure, their trap, and how if they're "about" anything, they're about everything.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
Early in my relationship with my now-husband, he told me he had a small birthday gift for me. I asked if he had relief from the pain of linear time because I was presenting as max sad and mysterious and said things like that. He said, "maybe," and gave me his personal copy of Wallace's essays. It's always special when someone gives you their own, well-traveled and worn piece of their personal canon. I also got the gift of someone I loved and respected being my inroad into a writer who is so often eclipsed by his own fans - or stereotypes about his fans. My husband read the first essay, "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" out loud to me while lying around in Prospect Park, which you know, was a break from the march of time.
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
I got so obsessed with The Age of Innocence as a teenager that I eventually inspired my dad to read it. For Christmas when I was about 19 he gave me a hardbound, nice copy with a personal message to me inscribed in his trademark awful handwriting. My young adulthood and on has been the part of my life when I've been able to see my dad for the private intellectual, man of letters type he is. We still have wildly different tastes in reading, but I know we're always interested in what the other has to say.
Molly Starr lives with her husband and baby in South Carolina. You can find her at https://feelings.technology.
Billy Glidden
The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, Joe McGinniss
My mom and my friend James joined forces to give me this book for my 31st birthday. The book is by James’s father, the late Joe McGinniss, who, I am told, wrote this book about an Italian soccer team instead of one about the O.J. Simpson trial. Joe made the right call. Asked to write an inscription on the inside cover, James channeled his father: “Always remember, as I never did, that it’s better to burn in hell than to burn a bridge. Ciao, Joe”
The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie
“A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story,” Paul Elie writes in this captivating exploration of the lives of four great Catholic writers in the mid-twentieth century: Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day. My friend Nick gave me this book in 2019, maybe for Christmas. I devoured it, and I’ve been journeying in the light of these writers’ stories ever since.
In early 2018, immobilized by knee surgery, I welcomed many visitors to my childhood home in Holyoke, Massachusetts. One of those visitors was my buddy Soph, who came bearing books, one of which was Rabbit, Run by John Updike. Within the year, I’d finished Updike’s entire Rabbit tetralogy.
The Next Right Thing, Dan Barden
My friend William buys copies of this book and hands them out. It’s a quick read, the whodunnit at its core serving as a vehicle for the practical, gritty wisdom of twelve-step spirituality. The best moment is when Terry, our protagonist’s AA sponsor says, “God loves you because that’s just what God does. Wade and I throw parties for your sorry ass because that’s what we do. It’s not about you, Randy. Which is mighty good news, because if it were about you, our lives would be a fucking nightmare.”
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
I lived with a roommate from India for three years. One April, unsure of what to get me for my birthday, Gomathi went to a local bookstore and started describing me to the booksellers. Irish. Catholic. Likes books. What should she get me? They spent an hour deliberating, and together they arrived at this shining and heartbreaking novella.
Billy Glidden is a writer from Holyoke, Massachusetts. His work has been published in Cutleaf and Ekstasis.
David Iscoe
This came from my parents. I was maybe 13 and I thought it was hilarious. I got some of the jokes but not all of them. But I got enough of the form, and I started making my own parody newspaper. It gave me something to do with my disorganized mind. I thought a lot of things were dumb but didn't do a great job building out an alternative. The Onion style let me take aim at how existing things were dumb, without the responsibility of building my own completely coherent voice — I could just riff on things. I was in the midst of trying to develop my own voice when I got a job at The Onion, which changed my life. It made me step up my game, introduced me to talented writers, and gave me, for a while, commercially viable outlets for my writing. The really great thing was I didn't have to market myself there; I just showed up with ideas. Of course I leaned on the group voice and other things were underdeveloped; plus my work was works-made-for-hire and I never got a portfolio. But it was tons of fun, and it all came from this childhood gift.
The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty
I got this from my friend Christine, and technically it was a loan, not a gift. I did give it back, but I have other Paul Beatty books now that I got on my own. So the gift has endured in spirit. Paul Beatty is very funny, he just jokes all the time. He hits targets along the way that turn into patterns. He also jokes through poetry; he can string verses together. He never stops moving and riffing. These are some of the skills I have as a writer, but to a much lesser degree, and with much less control, so it was very humbling. It taught me I should lay off trying to lean on these gifts for a while and simply try and be useful. I was sick of leaning on cleverness, so it was fun seeing someone whose cleverness didn't make me sick. It could be done, it was nice to see, but not by me. Besides being a masterful demonstration of style, its substance also got me to think more about the smallness of the world I was raised in, mostly dominated by fancy white people like my family. I haven't transcended that perspective but I got a little bit of a humility which I'm better off having than not.
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand-Celine
A gift from my friend Anton. We were working together in a meaningless wage-labor office job, and by luck we were paired together. He was a voracious reader with a sense of humor and a deep appreciation for humanity, although you might not catch him admitting to the latter. Anton was against moralism, which appalled me because I was trying to remake myself with a big moral foundation, which I thought could help me persevere through the heartbreak of adulthood not turning out how I'd liked. I didn't want to be the kind of adult adults wanted me to be, and I thought out-moralizing them might help repel their moralistic judgment of my not having turned out like them. But Anton thought moralism in general was a bit much. In theory he was this bad person; he was fascinated with psychopaths, and with the idea of some kind of artistic/philosophical purity that was incompatible with too much of a moral life. But in practice he was a pretty conscientious guy who mostly helped people out and gave them thoughtful gifts, or at least that's what it seemed like outside his forays into debauchery he was always alluding to. Case in point; Celine turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer, but Anton could never follow his own proximate literary scene into their neo-reactionary decline. He probably tells himself it's to protect his artistic mind against the dumbing effects of Nazism, but deep down he doesn't have it in him to join the oppressors. The book was pretty funny and had some guts to it, even though some of its author's appalling and asinine beliefs showed at times. But you don't need to get everything right to write a good book.
Promenade by Maria Irene Fornes
I got this from my friend Kelsey, another one of those friends whose recommendations I will always take seriously. Fornes is very creative with structure. At the time I was doing a lot of improv, in a scene centered around the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theatre, and there was an obsession over this one form, "The Harold." It's based on simple threefold repetition. I was sick of it from very early; it drove me absolutely crazy that people would start from this theoretically limitless space, improvising the world, only to just keep building the same thing again and again. They were delighted that it could be filled with different things, but I thought the structure was itself a language, even though I hadn't mastered playing with structure. So it completely revived my soul to see someone who had. Fornes, of course, didn't just have structure. She also had these deep life observations underpinning it. Which I was struggling to uncover. But I loved the plays, and it made me think of this whole other world, where people studied creative possibilities in a certain way. Kelsey had not just studied Fornes in school, she had studied with her. I'd gone to a similarly fancy school, I'd probably had analogous if not equal opportunities. But I hadn't had the guts to study drama; I was afraid of how insubstantial I was as a person, to be taking on that kind of magic, stepping in a room with such people. But I respected it. I just needed to know it was being done.
Samuel Beckett - The Complete Dramatic Works
I'm counting this is a gift. My friends Chris and Kelly had me catsit for them, and told me I was welcome to use their apartment, which was nicer than my own. I had a studio; they had a one-bedroom. I stayed out of the one bedroom and sat in the other room. Just having a room that didn't have a bed helped me think. I'd just re-read Invisible Man, and I'd remembered that Ralph Ellison wrote it at a friend's apartment, where it felt like he was going to work. I wanted to use their apartment the same way. After failing to write I took the Beckett book off the shelf. I read "Endgame" and a few others, including "The Old Tune." I loved how slow and stark everything was. I liked that he was very serious in his irony. I'll always love Beckett's work. I think he's very funny and the type of funny that is built to last. It made me want to really try and capture the world, not just make jokes, even though I'm just an idiot. I maybe could have had a career making jokes but I was already getting tired of it.
David Iscoe is a writer, teacher, and part-time museum worker based in New London, CT, where he lives with his spouse and dog.
Diana Valenzuela
The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf
My abuela purchased this book for me as a Christmas gift in the 90’s — maybe because she misinterpreted my soul as being gentle, maybe because she just liked cattle. Whatever. This story follows a docile bull who loves to smell flowers, but — thanks to a wacky coincidence — is sent to Madrid to challenge a matador to bullfight. This is a must-read if you’ve ever felt mis-labeled as aggressive or if you love the late musician Elliot Smith, who had a Ferdinand tattoo.
I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins
My mother gave me this book, which is fitting because it’s a fictional-ish account of a mom gone off the rails. On a trip out West, Claire abandons her family to embark upon a meaningless affair with a pretty forgettable dude. But the desert holds the story of Claire’s intergenerational trauma, and she’s finally ready to stick her thumb into that raw, open wound.
I’m cheating here, because I first found this book in a lost-and-found when I was 14 — back when I would take a chance on any book that I found, because I believed that the book had found me. Still, a decade later, my first copy fell apart and my best friend gifted me a cherished replacement. Marjane is a precocious young girl coming of age during and after the Iranian Revolution. Satrapi interweaves my favorite literary fixation — adolescent angst — with the brutal trauma caused by war and religious extremism.
My mother (a repeat offender in the game of literary gift-giving) tossed me this book when I was in middle school, and I’ve kept the copy ever since. The narrative follows two generations of an immigrant family, but primarily focuses on Gogol Ganguli, a disgruntled first-generation Bengali-American kid from suburban Massachusetts who doesn’t understand the origins of his awkward name and legally changes it the moment he turns 18. As Gogol ages, he gradually begins to understand the mystery of heritage and accepts awkwardness as a necessary part of remaining viscerally connected to culture.
Diana Valenzuela is a writer and My Chemical Romance fan from Oakland, California. Her work has been published in The Millions and the New Orleans Review.