FOR THOSE FRIENDS and family members on your holiday season gift list who are avid readers, that spellbinding best-seller or the nonfiction work that speaks to one of their other passions is an obvious choice to wrap up for them. But there are other options for supporting and enhancing their reading pleasure, and they are many and multiform. Here are just a few suggestions.
Fans of the late, great Kurt Vonnegut may be surprised to learn, as was I, that the author of such classics as “Slaughterhouse Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “Welcome to the Monkey House,” was so hard-pressed for cash early in his writing career that he pursued other sources of income, including selling cars. But none of these efforts engaged his passion as much as designing a board game he called General Headquarters. A two-player game on a standard checkerboard in which each combatant maneuvers pieces that represent tanks, infantry, artillery and paratroopers, its goal is to capture the headquarters of the opposition. Vonnegut peddled it to publishers assiduously and played it regularly with his son Mark, but it was a disappointing failure in his own time. But this year, thanks in part to efforts by a board game designer named Geoff Engelstein, it has been taken up by Mars International, Inc. and marketed through Barnes & Noble for $34.95. It may appeal as equally to aficionados of Risk and Strategy as it does to Vonnegut fans, so game on!
A puzzle as charming as it is potentially perplexing, the 1,000-piece Reader’s Paradise designed by artist Aimee Stewart and marketed by White Mountain Puzzles depicts the interior of a multilevel bookstore — complete with a curled-up kitty at the bottom of a curving staircase — in astounding and colorful detail. Available at Barnes & Noble, where it retails for $19.99, the 24-by-30-inch jigsaw puzzle can also be found online through other retailers or ordered directly from White Mountain Puzzles.
Light up a bookworm’s life with an unusual stained-glass book lamp from Unusualjoy.com, which piles four colorful Tiffany-style books up in kitty-corner fashion, soldering 70 cuts of glass together to form a stylish stack. It comes with a 66-inch cord, has an inline switch and is sold through the website for $49.99.
Feline-themed bookends are a thing, apparently. The internet is awash with them. Here are a couple of my favorites: The black cat bookends from Living Spaces feature two active kitties, made of polystone with a tarnished black iron finish that are especially cute because they are each wearing spectacles, which must mean they are trying to get at those books so they can read them. They measure 6-by-4-by-7 inches in width, depth and height, respectively, weigh a total of 1.4 pounds and retail for $37.
But for something a little more regal than whimsical to keep your books in line, how about hiring replicas of Patience and Fortitude, the two magnificent maned lions that guard the entrance to the New York Main Public Library in Midtown Manhattan. Hand-cast in a blend of marble powder and museum-quality resin, they are padded to protect the furniture as well and weigh about 7 pounds each. A library exclusive (item number LRBE22), they can be ordered for a whopping $175 for nonmembers, with a shipping fee of $15 added at checkout.
Those who played Go Fish as kids probably won’t need to read the instructions for Authors, a card game that has been around, in one form or another, since a company in Salem, Massachusetts, first published it in 1861. The current version features 13 famous (dead) authors, and the object is to collect them and match them with cards for three of their works. The 52-card deck is marked in the corners so that other common games can be played as well. The usual suspects are there — Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Washington Irving, etc. You can find it for as little as $7 on various websites, including Amazon.
And the winner is…: By unanimous decision in mid-November, the five judges of this year’s Booker Prize for literary fiction have selected British author Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” as the top book for 2024, awarding her the trophy and the equivalent of nearly $63,000 in English pounds. It is an unusual pick at only 136 pages long and the only winner in the history of the prize to be set in outer space. Its protagonists are six astronauts and cosmonauts from the United States, Russia, Italy, the U.K. And Japan who are circling the Earth in the International Space Station over the course of a single day. The judges’ statement reads, in part: “During those 24 hours, they observe 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets over their silent blue planet, spinning past continents and cycling past seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. This compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth’s splendor, whilst reflecting on the individual and collective value of every human life.” When she emerged in October as one of the six finalists, Harvey, who is also a sculptor, told the panel that she had been ruminating over a potential novel about humans in orbit for decades, not as a science fiction work, but as realism. “Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer?” she said. “Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself.”
In the pipeline: Speaking of prestigious literary awards, Han Kang, the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature winner and the author of “The Vegetarian,” has a new novel coming out from Hogarth Press on Jan. 21 of next year. The first writer from South Korea to win the Nobel, Kang evokes a somewhat buried chapter in her country’s history, the 1948 uprising on Jeju Island, in “We Do Not Part.” The novel focuses on the bond between two women, one of whom arrives on the island to come to the aid of her distraught friend. Hernan Diaz, whose novel “Trust” shared a Pulitzer with Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead” last year, has called it “a disquietingly beautiful novel about the impossibility of waking up from the nightmare of history. Han Kang’s prose, as delicate as footprints in the snow or a palimpsest of shadows, conjures up the specters haunting a nation, a family, a friendship. Unforgettable.”
One dandy tradition: For many around the world, December 24 is heralded as Christmas Eve. But in Iceland, since 1944, it has meant something more. It is also welcomed as — and we’ll need help pronouncing it — Jólabókaflód, which translates as Yule book flood. Having established its independence from Denmark in 1944, the country, though formally neutral, was in the throes of WWII, with many retail items strictly rationed. Paper, however, was not, and therefore the time-honored tradition began of giving one another books on Christmas Eve and gathering to read them on that night together, while drinking hot chocolate or an alcohol-free ale called jólabland. The practice has contributed enormously to the country becoming a nation of book lovers; a 2013 study by Bifröst University has concluded that half of all Icelanders read more than eight books a year. You can learn more about it at jolabokaflod.org. And here on YouTube is a video that lets you hear how it is pronounced.
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can’t-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month.
The post Hooked on Books: The gift-wrapped package for a bibliophile doesn’t have to be a book appeared first on Local News Matters.