Gift Guide for the Book Lover
The book lover is that person in your life who happily sits out the revelry on New Year's Eve
to curl up by the fire with a 600-page tome. Here are a few suggestions for the person who
just can't stop reading.
"From the Library Of..." Stamp:
Why not order a custom-made
hand stamp that your favorite book lover can use to place an imprimatur inside the front cover of every
book she owns? It is a cheap and easy gift that will go a long way to show you understand her passion.
|
|
|
Pop-Up Booklight:
The incredibly compact Pop-Up
Booklight unfolds with a press of a button to provide a personal reading lamp. It clips to any book for
hands free illumination to read anywhere in any light without disturbing others. Long-life LED lasts 100,000
hours. Uses easily replaceable button-cell batteries (included).
|
2005 National Book Awards:
Fiction Winner:
Fiction Finalists:
-
The March by E.L. Doctorow
In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched sixty thousand
troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. At the center of this
story are General Sherman himself; a beautiful freed slave girl named Pearl; a Union regimental
surgeon, Colonel Sartorius; Emily Thompson, the dispossessed daughter of a Southern judge; and
Arly and Will, two misfit soldiers.
-
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
This is a novel is about a close friendship between two women marked by fierce understanding of
the dynamics of modern relationships.
-
Trance by Christopher Sorrentino
Set in 1974, Christopher Sorrentino's novel takes the reader across a beleaguered and divided
America, in the company of scam artists, visionaries, reporters, cops, cultists, and a gang of
middle-class militants who typify the guiding conceit of their time.
-
Holy Skirts by Rene Steinke
Before today's outsized celebrities, there was the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Set in
Greenwich Village in 1917, she was a poet and artist, proto-punk rocker, sexual libertine, and
fashion avatar. At the center of the Dadaist circle, the Baroness transformed herself into a
living, breathing work of art.
|
|
|
2005 National Book Awards:
Nonfiction Winner:
-
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Didion humbly tells the story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically
induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack. It is a powerful and moving
work about Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed
idea I ever had about death, about illness...about marriage and children and memory...about life itself."
Nonfiction Finalists:
-
Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion by Alan Burdick
Alan Burdick's Out of Eden charts the transplantation of species in the age of globalization.
Bird-eating snakes from Australia hitchhike to Hawaii in airplane landing gear; flies from the
U.S. prey on Darwin's finches in the Galapagos; predatory American jellyfish migrate to Russia - the
list goes on and on. The fastest-growing threat to biological diversity may be fast-moving nature itself.
-
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius by Leo Damrosch
The extraordinary life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century literary genius who changed
the course of history, is traced with novelistic verve. Motherless child, failed apprentice, autodidact,
impossibly odd lover, Jean-Jacques Rousseau burst unexpectedly onto the eighteenth-century scene as a
literary provocateur whose works electrified readers from the start. Rousseau's impact on American
social and political thought remains deep, wide, and, to some, even infuriating.
-
102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn
Of the millions of words written about September 11, 2001, most have been from the outside looking in.
In 102 Minutes, New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn report solely from the perspective of
the people inside the towers. It is the epic account of ordinary men and women who saved themselves and others.
-
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild
This book is an account of the first grassroots human rights campaign, which freed hundreds of thousands
of slaves around the world. In 1787, twelve men met in a London printing shop to pursue a seemingly
impossible goal: ending slavery in the largest empire on earth. Along the way, they would pioneer most of
the tools citizen activists still rely on today.
|
2005 National Book Awards:
Poetry Winner:
-
Migration: New and Selected Poems by W.S. Merwin
W.S. Merwin might just be the most influential American poet of the last half-century-an artist who has
transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. Migration: New and Selected Poems is a
distillation of the best poems from a profound body of work and it includes a selection of new poems.
Poetry Finalists:
-
Where Shall I Wander by John Ashbery
This collection from John Ashbery is a modestly scaled affair: it doesn't end with a grand long poem, which
has become an Ashbery trademark since Rivers and Mountains, nor is it especially big like Can You Hear, Bird
nor does it even contain many poems that extend more than three pages. The book as a whole takes the
pleasures of games and makes of them poetic seductions.
-
Star Dust: Poems by Frank Bidart
In 2002, Frank Bidart published a sequence of poems, Music Like Dirt, the first chapbook ever to be a finalist
for the Pulitzer Prize. From the beginning, he had conceived this sequence as the opening movement in a larger
structure - now, with Star Dust, finally complete. Throughout his work, Bidart has been uniquely alert to the
dramatic possibilities of violence; in this, and in his sense of theater, he resembles the great Jacobean dramatists.
-
Habitat: New and Selected Poems by Brendan Galvin
A master craftsman who seamlessly combines vision and contemplation, Brendan Galvin is considered among the
most powerful naturalist poets today. Habitat, Galvin's fourteenth poetry book, combines eighteen new works
with lyric pieces from the past forty years, including two book-length narratives.
-
The Moment's Equation by Vern Rutsala
This collection of poetry is Vern Rutsala's eleventh. Among awards for his work are a Guggenheim Fellowship,
two NEA grants, the Juniper Prize, an Oreqon Book Award, two Carolyn Kizer Poetry Prizes, the Duncan Lawrie
Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Akron Poetry Prize, the Northwest Poetry Prize, and a Masters Fellowship from
the Oregon Arts Commission.
|
|
|
2005 National Book Awards:
Young People's Literature Winner:
-
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall
This summer the Penderwick sisters have a wonderful surprise: a holiday on the grounds of a beautiful estate.
Soon they are busy discovering the summertime magic of sprawling gardens, a treasure-filled attic, tame
rabbits, and the cook who makes the best gingerbread in Massachusetts. But the best discovery of all is
Jeffrey Tifton, son of the owner, who quickly proves to be the perfect companion for their adventures.
Young People's Literature Finalists:
-
Where I Want to Be by Adele Griffin
Teen sisters Jane and Lily tell the story of their relationship in alternating chapters. The gradually developing
plot brings a growing understanding that Jane is telling her story after her death. In life, she had a difficult
time separating the real from the pretend. Thoughtful, unique, and ultimately life-affirming, this is a
fascinating take on the literary device of a main character speaking after death.
-
Inexcusable by Chris Lynch
Keir Sarafian may not know much, but he knows that he is a good guy. A guy who's a devoted son and brother, a
loyal friend, and a reliable teammate. And maybe most important of all, a guy who understands that when a girl
says no, she means it. But that is not what Gigi Boudakian, childhood friend and Keir's lifelong love, says he
is. As Keir recalls the events leading up to his fateful night with Gigi, he realizes that the way things look
are definitely not the way they really are - and that it may be all too easy for a good guy to do something
terribly wrong. This is a no-holds-barred story about truth, lies, and responsibility.
-
Autobiography of My Dead Brother by Walter Dean Myers
This is a realistic urban novel that probes a fatal crisis in the life of two boys. Jesse, the book's narrator,
and Rise are best friends, but as time passes, Rise grows increasingly alienated and unpredictable. Living in
a neighborhood where gang fights and drive-by shootings are commonplace, Jesse wonders whether he and his
estranged blood brother are already doomed.
-
Each Little Bird That Sings by Deborah Wiles
Comfort Snowberger is well acquainted with death since her family runs the funeral parlor in their small
southern town, but even so the ten-year-old is unprepared for the series of heart-wrenching events that
begins on the first day of Easter vacation with the sudden death of her beloved great-uncle Edisto.
|
2005 Pulizer Prize Winners:
Fiction:
-
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Set in 1956, Rev. John Ames, a 77-year-old, is in failing health with a much younger wife and six-year-old
son. He writes in the form of a letter to his young son, who he imagines reading it when he is grown. Ames
details the struggles of a long and difficult life. This book captures life's universals of strength, struggle,
joy and forgiveness.
History:
-
Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer
At the core of this military history is an analysis of George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River in
December 1776 and the resulting destruction of the Hessian garrison of Trenton and defeat of a British brigade
at Princeton. Fischer's perceptive discussion of the strategic, operational and tactical factors involved is
by itself worth the book's purchase. However, even more compelling is the revelation of a distinctively American
way of war, much of it based on a single fact: civil and military leaders were accountable to a citizenry through
their representatives.
Biography:
-
de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Stevens' and Swan's landmark biography is a stunning art book - a masterpiece that explains how the Dutchman de
Kooning became the master painter of the American century. Raised by a mom who beat him with wooden shoes, de
Kooning escaped Rotterdam as a stowaway on a freighter and found a second family in New York's rampageous art
bohemia. He subsisted on ketchup and booze, and broke through around 1950 with dazzling abstract expressionist
canvases inspired by what was in the air: cubism, surrealism, jazz, and film noir.
Poetry:
-
Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser
These poems paint pictures of the people and experiences in Kooser's eastern Nebraska in a lightly restrained
style. He envisions faith passing as casually "from door to door" as a pair of plaster or plastic "Praying Hands"
en route to "every thrift shop in America."
General Nonfiction:
|
|
|
2005 PEN/Faulkner Awards for Fiction:
Winner:
-
War Trash by Ha Jin
Jin applies his steady gaze and stripped-bare storytelling to the violence and horrifying political uncertainty
of the Korean War. This book tells the story of a reluctant soldier trying to survive a POW camp and reunite
with his family.
Finalists:
-
The Green Lantern by Jerome Charyn
Ivan Azerbaijan is a poor boy from the mountains who comes to Moscow with a traveling theater troupe to build
sets for a new production of King Lear. When the theater troupe's leader is incapacitated, the six-foot-six
Ivanushka, or "Little Ivan," is thrust into the role of Lear and discovers a talent for acting that makes the
humble production the toast of Moscow's elite. Ivanushka attracts so much attention that Joseph Stalin himself
descends to the tiny theater.
-
The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
Haitian-born Danticat's third novel focuses on the lives affected by a "dew breaker," or torturer of Haitian
dissidents under Duvalier's regime. Each chapter reveals the man from another viewpoint, including that of his
grown daughter, who, on a trip she takes with him to Florida, learns the secret of his violent past and those
of the Haitian boarders renting basement rooms in his Brooklyn home.
-
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (reviewed above)
-
Prisoners of War by Steve Yarbrough
Set in the same small Mississippi town as Yarbrough's critically acclaimed Visible Spirits, this complex
WWII-era novel explores questions of morality and social inequity in the rural South when a group of German
POWs are quartered at a local camp and sent to work as day laborers on nearby farms.
|
|
|
|
