Lisa Rogak’s Holiday Gift Suggestion

Lisa Rogak is the author of more than 40 books; her most recent is A Boy Named Shel, a biography of songwriter, poet, cartoonist, and children’s book author Shel Silverstein. She’s also the author of an unauthorized bio of Da Vinci Code scribe Dan Brown… but her taste in international bestselling thrillers seems to run a bit more upscale, as her holiday gift recommendation demonstrates.

Whenever one of my friends sees me headed their way with a fiendish glint in my eye and a book in my hand thrust out in their direction as if in greeting, I know they’re going to react in one of two ways: Either they quickly glance at their wrist —whether or not it is adorned by a watch—and offer up some lame excuse about how they’re late for a clambake, or they get that deer-in-headlights look and start to sprint towards me in a dead run, anxious to see what it is I’ve discovered this time…

I tend to read some pretty obscure books in the course of my research, with usually ten or more fighting for my attention at any one time, and so I do occasionally wonder about those who eagerly accept a copy of The Only Way to Learn Astrology, The Ghosts of Williamsburg, or Opus Ultimum: The Story of the Mozart Requiem from my outstretched hands. But this year, the book I most often pushed upon them is The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, a beautifully-written Gothic novel translated from the Spanish about a boy, a book, and a nonstop twisty mystery that usually succeeded in tearing my attention away from more important things—like deadlines—whenever I had the nerve to put it down.

And now it’s my friends’ turns to look at me wide-eyed, because I rarely read novels. But The Shadow of the Wind literally took my breath away.

27 November 2007 | gift ideas, guest authors |

Holiday Gift Ideas from MacAdam/Cage Authors

I’ve been very busy over at my other blog, keeping up-to-date with everything that’s been going on in the Judith Regan scandal, but fortunately my friends at the independent publishing house MacAdam/Cage had some last-minute gift ideas for those of you who haven’t figured out what books to get for your friends and loved ones in the days ahead…

Frank Turner Hollon (Blood & Circumstance): I’ve never been one of those people who likes to watch the same movie over and over. Until recently, I wasn’t the type of person to read a book more than once. It seemed a waste of time. Time better spent reading something new.

But now, at age 43, with three kids, a full-time job, and the good fortune of six published novels, time constraints have made me choose—and strangely, I have chosen the past over the present, going back to read again novels that made such an impression upon me so many years ago. Is it the particular novel alone that makes the impression, or is it the unique combination of the certain moment in your life and the novel that fits the moment perfectly?

The Last Gentleman, by Walker Percy, still affects me as it did twenty years ago, sending me back to my time as a college student in New Orleans, barefoot, reading in the streetcar on the way to school, the expectation of a world ahead. Who could ask for a better gift ?

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21 December 2006 | gift ideas |