Books are always on my shopping list—and my wish list—this time of year. A gift of a book gives the receiver hours of enjoyment while reading it, and a lifetime of satisfaction remembering or returning to it. And there is a book for everyone.
I recall a student many years ago on our first trip to the
library that semester. He claimed that he didn’t like to read. “OK,” I told
him. “What do you like?”
“I like music, miss,” he said.
“OK,” I said. “Follow me.”
I took him to the stacks and found a copy of The Commitments (1989) by Roddy Doyle.
The story is about a group of working class youth whose mission is to bring Soul
music to Dublin. An added bonus is that the novel is heavy on realistic dialog
with just enough narration to keep the story moving.
The student took the book because he was too polite not to.
I could tell he was skeptical.
The following day in class, the student rushed up to me and
said “I didn’t know there were books like this!”
Everyone is a reader when they have the right book.
So, here are some recommendations for holiday shopping.
History
I’ve read several books about the people, other than the
soldiers on the front lines, that were instrumental in the Allies’ victory in
WWII. One of the best of these is Code
Girls (2017) by Liza Mundy.
The US Army and Navy operated parallel programs that relied
heavily on women recruited from universities and small towns to learn and then
use the meticulous skills necessary to break enemy codes. The work of these
women and others saved countless lives and shortened the war by as much as two
years.
Although Mundy’s book is carefully researched nonfiction,
the books is as readable as any novel.
Literary Fiction
Although this title is not new, The Little Friend (2002) by Donna Tartt is a riveting and haunting
tale of crime and punishment, innocence and evil. Although Tartt won the 2014
Pulitzer Prize for The Goldfinch, I
believe The Little Friend is a
superior novel.
Twelve-year-old Harriet Dufresnes, whose family was
destroyed by the murder of her 9-year-old brother when Harriet was just a baby,
sets out to find the killer. She convinces herself that local redneck criminal
Danny Ratliff is the killer and begins stalking him. The novel turns into a
thriller as Harriet’s pursuit of Ratliff leads her into mortal danger.
Romance
The Giver of Stars
(2019) by Jojo Moyes tells the based-on-real-people story of the packhorse
librarians in rural, Depression-era Kentucky. The Pack Horse Library Project
was a WPA program that served around 100,000 Kentuckians between 1935 and 1943.
The Giver of Stars
tells not only the story of the librarians and their efforts to promote
literacy in the poorest and most remote areas of the country, it also touches
on issues of women’s rights and autonomy, censorship, racism, domestic abuse,
and union busting. Oh, and there are some love stories in there, too.
Cookbooks
Cooking can seem like a chore to working people. Many turn
to meal prepping on the weekend. Even that seems to me like a lot of planning
work.
Cassy Joy Garcia’s newest cookbook Cook Once, Eat All Week (2019) solves these problems. For each
week, Garcia provides a shopping list, which includes alternatives for those
with food sensitivities, prepping instructions, and recipes.
I had always imagined meal prepping was cooking a bunch of
food on Sunday, and then reheating different dishes the rest of the week. Not
so with Garcia’s book. Prep day includes things like chopping or roasting
vegetables, or searing meats. The work on each meal day is expedited by having
the components ready. Another important feature of Garcia’s system is that
there is no waste. If you need two chicken breasts for one meal, that recipe is
paired with one that calls for the rest of the chicken.
Audiobooks
I recently listened to the e-audio version of Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen (2018)
by Sarah Bird.
The title refers to a fictionalized version of an actual
person, Cathy Williams, a freed slave who disguised herself as a man and served
in the Buffalo Soldiers for two years after the Civil War.
The story is funny, heartbreaking, and inspiring. Narrator
Bahni Turpin is brilliant. She brings to life dozens of characters, conveying
the tragedy and the comedy of Bird’s story.
Everyone loves being read to, but Turpin’s portrayal of the
characters in this book make it a special treat.
