Gifts Part One
Art books, books about art, and more
Hello!
Nobody buys me books anymore. This is reasonable—I get at least one galley in the mail every day, and I also never stop book-shopping—and yet I still think books are the best gifts. What else can you curl up with ten minutes after unwrapping it? And how better can you demonstrate that you know and care what someone you love thinks about than by giving them a book that chimes with their obsessions?
These recommendations, then, are based less on person than preoccupation. All of them are books that, if I didn’t have them already, I would love to receive.
A note on buying them: I’m sure you don’t need me to remind you not to get books on Amazon, but I’m both an oldest daughter and a Jewish mom, which means it’s doubly my culture to be bossy. So—no Amazon! I’ll link to Bookshop and to some of my favorite independent bookstores, but I very much suggest and endorse shopping at your bookstores. For used books, I love (read: am addicted to) Thriftbooks. I also highly recommend eBay.
For A Person Thinking about Art, Parenthood, or Both
Most books about the intersection of art and parenthood are dour and dire. Ignore them! The person most worth reading on these subjects is the photographer Sally Mann, who is one of the greatest living artists of parenthood. In her memoirs, Hold Still and Art Work, she rummages gorgeously through her psyche and past. Both books are wise and shaggy, written with the loose animation that I often see in memoirs by artists and never in memoirs by memoirists. If I wanted to get an Art Parent a truly indulgent gift, I’d buy both of Mann’s memoirs and track down one of her photography books on eBay to go with them.
Incidentally, Art Work contains a mandate-cum-complaint that is perfect to me: “Every artist needs a dog. Every human needs a dog. Rescue a dog right now. But nowhere in the many books I’ve now read about the creative life does anyone talk about the importance of dogs.” Don’t read those books! Read Sally Mann.
For A Person Thinking about Writing A Book
Get them Rabih Alameddine’s second novel, I, The Divine, which came out in 2003 but is the best book I read this year. It’s written as a string of openings for a memoir that the narrator will clearly never complete—and it’ll discourage your gift-recipient, too!
Kidding, kidding. I, The Divine is brilliant. The structure, which sounds something between unappealing and insane, works. It’s tricky, charming, and propulsive all at once, and its sheer intelligence is enough to spur any writer to write.
For A Person Thinking about Ineffable Mysteries
Get this person Beings, by Ilana Masad. It’s a literary novel about alien abduction, a sad archivist, and a lesbian sci-fi writer making her way in the ’50s, but really, it’s about obsession, yearning, and the absolute unknowability of life on earth and beyond. It also has elegant, slinky prose of a kind that’s increasingly hard to come by. Subtle and great!
For A Person Thinking about Why the World’s Going to Shit
Do not give this person a book that purports to have answers! Nobody has answers. Instead, give them Vivek Shanbhag’s tight, ominous novel Sakina’s Kiss, translated from Kannada by Srinath Perur. In this book, the pressure of malevolent political forces and the protagonist’s inner malevolence build together to an unbearable point—and then, instead of resolving, the book simply bursts. You could consider giving this book to a person you dislike, since it makes the reader feel very, very bad.
For a Person Who Wants to Not Think
Get this person Kiran Desai’s new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny. It’s nearly seven hundred pages, and every one of those pages is so descriptively and emotionally vivid—so stuffed with romance and malevolence and envy and outfits and architecture and Uruguayan restaurants in Queens—that it simply shuts the reader’s mind up. Having your inner monologue obliterated by the pleasures of a book is, in my opinion, bliss.
For a Person Who Is a Toddler Obsessed with Art Books
Sam Gilliam. Can’t tell you why, but I can tell you it’s a hit. More importantly, this monograph is a beautiful and luxurious gift to give any adult in your life, but especially an adult who is engaged with and respects the art and culture of Washington, D.C. Wrap this up with Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City, and you will have given the most D.C. gift of all time.