Culture
December 2012 Issue

The Best Books of the Year, and Whom to Give Them To

Still stumped by what to get those hard-to-shop-for types on your holiday gift list? In Part Two of her year-end review, Elissa Schappell scours her favorite titles of 2012 for the perfect last-minute presents.
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Still stumped by what to get those hard-to-shop-for types on your holiday gift list? In Part Two of her year-end review, *V.F.’*s books columnist scours her favorite titles of 2012 for the perfect last-minute presents.

READ Part One, for more top-shelf gift ideas.

See All of V.F.’s 2012 gift guides.

The hellidays, oh how I adore them, although they do take a toll on even the best of us. Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, Boxing Day, Boxing-up-and-moving-out-because-that-sweater-you-gave-me-proves-you-don’t-even-know-me-let-alone-love-me Day—they can be a torment, especially when you add the pressure of gift buying. Thus, I feel it is my civic duty to gift to you some last-minute book-shopping options for the various hard-to-please types who may be on your list. After all, you can’t go wrong with a book. No one is ever offended because the book you bought was too big (you think I have a fat bum?) or too slender, and at worst, it can be easily converted into a drink coaster. So, off you go to your local indie bookstore . . . Ho, ho, ho. And don’t forget Part One of our year’s-best gift guide for more tips on what to pick up when you get there.

Best books for: the cocktail-party intellectual.

In How Not to Read: Harnessing the Power of a Literature-Free Life (Perigee; $16, paperback), the deeply funny Dan Wilbur simultaneously amuses and acquaints readers—ever so fleetingly—with the classics. Creator of the hilarious “Better Book Titles” on Tumblr, Wilbur collects some of his best reimagined covers, such as for Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach (It’s OK if Giant Fruit Kills Your Aunts So Long as They Were Bitches) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (A Quaint, Midafternoon Panic Attack). And for those on the snarky book-party circuit who always kick themselves for devising clever comebacks only hours after the fact, Wilbur offers literary insults. With luck, you’ll never hear this from your giftee: “The only thing sadder than you is a Joycean epiphany!”

One to buy for your roommate, live-in, or spouse, and then read yourself! Even if he or she is already an arty know-it-all, Michael Bird’s 100 Ideas That Changed Art (Laurence King; $30, paperback), a showcase of the most influential developments in the history of art—from wall painting to the Internet, primitive to Pop—will come in handy. It may be easy to bluff one’s way through chats about street art or the use of narrative, but how about conceptual innovations like negative space and color theory? Or historical developments such as trompe l’oeil and artificial light? Ever succinct, Bird gets to the heart of each idea and includes visual aids (check out those for “body as surface” before you gift-wrap).

Best books for: dog lovers.

Dog people. The only thing they like better than talking about their canines and showing off pictures of their pets (they are pets!) dressed up as hot dogs on Halloween or reindeer at Christmas is, well … nothing. However, you know which dog owners don’t get to brag nearly enough about their beloved, because of the reaction they too often get? Pit-bull owners. Ken Foster, to the rescue. In I’m a Good Dog (Viking Studio; $17.50, paperback), Foster, the founder of the pit-bull advocacy-and-rescue group the Sula Foundation, celebrates “America’s most beautiful (and misunderstood) pet.” Part history, part tales of rescue and rehabilitation, and part artful photo book, it’s wholly lovable.

Is there a creature more bloodthirsty than a lawyer? Judging from the version of Thomas Cromwell that Hilary Mantel paints in her two Man Booker Prize–winning historical novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (Henry Holt; $28, hardcover), the answer is no. In the latter, the villainous and brilliant Cromwell—chief minister and attack dog of King Henry VIII—is let off the chain to pursue and take down his boss’s second wife, the famously spirited Anne Boleyn. Watching the blood-sniffing Cromwell hunt down Boleyn’s courtiers and then brutally interrogate her—cruel in the extreme, as of course she’s going to be executed and replaced with wife number three—is nerve-jangling.

Best books for: literary fanboys.

Kurt Vonnegut could scarcely do better than to have his close pal Dan Wakefield, himself a writer, edit his letters. Indeed Wakefield’s Kurt Vonnegut: Letters (Delacorte; $35, hardcover), a trove of 60 years’ worth of correspondence—mordantly funny, cranky, sentimental, full of aphorisms and humanistic insights—often reads less like an epistolary collection and more like an autobiography. In his letters, the vast majority unpublished, we see the iconic American author becoming such, as well as the genesis of some of his most famous work. In the letter that Vonnegut wrote his parents after being released from a German P.O.W. camp at age 22, a graphic description of the bombing of Dresden shows the beginnings of Slaughterhouse-Five. His voice is also clear in letters that slam local school boards for banning his books, in notes to fellow veterans and writers, and in the jackpot, his personal correspondence to friends and family.

D. T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (Viking; $28, hardcover), the biography of David Foster Wallace, arguably the greatest writer of my generation and the most famous literary suicide in memory, is as illuminating, multifaceted, and serious an estimation of Foster Wallace’s life and work as one can hope to find. While it’s obvious that Max, who had access to Foster Wallace’s letters as well as to his friends, family, contemporaries, greatly admires him as a writer and feels compassion for him as a man whose genius was outsized only by his loneliness and depression, he has too much respect to pull his punches. Foster Wallace was also a self-obsessed, tail-chasing jackass. Even his most howlingly fanatical readers (a majority of them over-achieving, over-educated white boys who enjoy mimicking Foster Wallace’s stylistic pyrotechnics) and most passionate haters (a majority of them over-achieving, over-educated white boys who despise Foster Wallace’s stylistic pyrotechnics as well as his celebrity) will find in Max’s bio something to love. A multi-purpose gift.
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