Mark Crick’s Holiday Gift Suggestion

Mark Crick, the author of Kafka’s Soup, couldn’t confine his recommendations to just one title. He doesn’t quite reach the number of authors covered in his literary pastiche of a cookbook, which reimagines classic recipes through the prism of 14 famous authors, but he comes awfully close!

mark-crick.jpgBuying books for friends is not always easy and it’s disappointing to see a book we gave for Christmas looking pristine on a friend’s bookshelf in June. I wouldn’t recommend giving a book you haven’t read yourself since it puts the receiver in the role of proofreader and anything too heavy is likely to require more commitment than a gift has a right to ask; a bit like giving someone a dog that needs two long walks and three meals a day. After years of book giving and receiving, with the exception of friends with special interests, I often fall back on two or three tried and tested titles.

Whilst The End of the Affair would certainly not be appropriate for a partner, the less well-known Travels With My Aunt is perhaps my favourite work by Graham Greene. You won’t be dishing up a large helping of Catholic guilt and the story is wonderfully funny and life affirming. I’ve also given and received Le Petit Prince by the French writer and aviator Antoine de St Exupery, a strange little tale with charming illustrations by the author and some touching wisdom on the subject of friendship and loss.

John Julius Norwich’s Christmas Cracker is a collection of literary oddities that made me laugh so much I wanted to share it with friends straightaway, and the version illustrated by Quentin Blake is as tempting as a box of chocolates. For young children I often give Roald Dahl’s The Twits or Fantastic Mr Fox, both also beautifully illustrated by Blake and fun to read aloud. Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man is wonderful and heroic; I loved it as a child but love it better now. Better still, buy it for yourself, learn the story by heart and tell it aloud on a car journey by night. Your travelling companions will love it and the oncoming headlights will look like the eyes of the great iron man himself, peering in on your storytelling.

It will be no surprise that I love to cook nor that there are many cookery books on my shelf that I have hardly read; one exception will be The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened. Sir Kenelm lived in 17th-century England, was a great collecter of recipes, and was rumoured to have poisoned his wife with a broth of vipers. A certain excitement accompanies the prospect of working from the recipes of a suspected poisoner and the language of the period adds to the atmosphere as I look forward to preparing Lady Vernon’s White Metheglin for holiday guests. With the more practical cook in mind, I’ve just spent a week in Devon cooking from Raymond Blanc’s Foolproof French Cookery and every dish has been a delight.

5 December 2006 | gift ideas |

Karen Rizzo’s Holiday Gift Suggestion

It’s that time of year again—I’ve recruited a bunch of authors to tell us about the books they think would make great gifts for whichever holidays you choose to celebrate this season. First up is Karen Rizzo; I met Karen at BookExpo last summer, when her publicist (who used to be my publicist) introduced us and gave me an advance copy of Things to Bring, S#!t to Do, a charming and funny memoir in the form of lists, or “inventories of anxiety” as she calls them. You can watch Karen read from her book on the YouTube to see what I mean.

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This millennium’s mother-of-all collections of original parenthood tales just happens to be written by a father, named (stay with me) Parent. In Believing it All: What My Children Taught Me About Trout Fishing, Jelly Toast and Life, Marc Parent takes us down a rural Pennsylvania path that yields an irrepressibly funny and mischievous, intuitive, and sometimes heart-rending meditation on life as a stay-at-home-dad to two young sons. Eschewing hipster irony and maudlin sentimentality, Parent (an author of three books and a deer-hunting liberal) chronicles his life with kids far from his former West Village haunts. A gift for any parent or person considering the prospect of parenthood. Actually, a gift for anyone who wants to laugh.

Okay, now for the kids (I’d give this next book to Parents’ boys): Charles Addams, my favorite cartoonist of all time, puts a most macabre and satisfying twist on Mother Goose in, appropriately enough, Charles Addams’ Mother Goose. For the 4-8 year old (or forty-eight year-old) in your life who’s twisting off her Barbie’s head or walking his action figures off a bathtub plank. I bought two copies; one for my kids and one for me.

27 November 2006 | gift ideas |

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