The following is a sample of the best and most beautiful books of 2005,
perfect for holiday gift-giving, selected by Harvard Book Store buyers
Carole Horne and Megan Sullivan and bookseller Kari Patch. They spoke about
these titles, and selections from our Holiday Hundred,
at our annual "Holiday Hints from the Experts" party on Thursday, December 1.
One Red Dot
by David A. Carter Simon & Schuster Our Price: $19.95
One Red Dot is a stunning tour de force from the creator of the bestselling Bugs in a Box books. From the flip-flop flaps to the whimsical wiggle-wobble widgets, each page is an original piece of artwork to cherish and admire.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
by Jane Smiley Knopf Our Price: $26.95
Suffering from writerÂ’s block, Smiley read one hundred novels, from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith, Nicholson Baker, and Alice Munro. This book is essential reading for anyone who has ever escaped into the pages of a novel or, for that matter, wanted to write one.
Anansi Boys
by Neil Gaiman Morrow/Avon Our Price: $26.95
When Fat Charlie's dad named something, it stuck. Like calling Fat Charlie "Fat Charlie." Even now, twenty years later, Charlie Nancy can't shake that name, one of the many embarrassing "gifts" his father bestowed -- before he dropped dead on a karaoke stage and ruined Fat Charlie's life.
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
by Barbara Ehrenreich Metropolitan Books Our Price: $24.00
Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed.
Black Hole
by Charles Burns Random House Our Price: $24.95
As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasnÂ’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird.
To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skinÂ…
The Book of Imaginary Beings
by Jorge Luis Borges Viking Books Our Price: $25.95
The Book of Imaginary Beings is BorgesÂ’s whimsical compendium of more than one hundred of the "strange creatures conceived down through history by the human imagination."
Boston, All One Family
by Bill Brett Commonwealth Editions Our Price: $27.95
Boston Globe society photographer Bill Brett has been taking pictures of the city's high and mighty since the 1960s. His first book shows their human side. With unequaled access, not only to business and cultural leaders but also to the community activists and philanthropists who give Boston its heart, Brett takes us into the homes and offices of the city's leaders, and out onto the streets where they live, work, and play.
Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles
by Francine Prose HarperCollins Publishers Our Price: $21.95
Francine Prose's life of Caravaggio evokes the genius of this great artist through a brilliant reading of his paintings. Caravaggio defied the aesthetic conventions of his time; his use of ordinary people, realistically portrayed — street boys, prostitutes, the poor, the aged — was a profound and revolutionary innovation that left its mark on generations of artists.
Described as the closest thing to a rock star in graphic design today (USA Today), Chip Kidd is universally recognized as an American master of contemporary book design.
City of Falling Angels
by John Berendt Penguin Press Our Price: $25.95
The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil returns after more than a decade to give us an intimate look at the "magic, mystery, and decadence" of the city of Venice and its inhabitants.
Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
by David Foster Wallace Little Brown and Company Our Price: $25.95
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humor? What is John Updike's deal anyway? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in his new book of hilarious nonfiction.
Crossword Obsession: The History and Lore of the World's Most Popular Pastime
by Coral Amende Berkley Publishing Group Our Price: $14.00
This lively, detailed history of the crossword puzzle gives you the whole story, from square one to the last word. With behind-the-scenes insights from competition champs, opinions from prominent puzzle makers, tips on cluing and construction, and a bonus selection of challenging puzzles, this book will delight anyone who's ever experienced the incomparable satisfaction of filling in the last blank — and finally cracking the crossword.
Crossworld: One Man's Journey Into America's Crossword Obsession
by Marc Romano Broadway Books Our Price: $24.95
In Crossworld, writer, translator, and lifelong puzzler Marc Romano goes where no Number 2 pencil has gone before, as he delves into the minds of the worldÂ’s cleverest crossword creators and puzzlers, and sets out on his own quest to join their ranks.
Dancing in the Dark
by Caryl Phillips Knopf Our Price: $23.95
“[Phillips] transports readers to early twentieth-century Harlem and fictionalizes with profound sensitivity and unflinching candor the outwardly successful yet spiritually disastrous life of Bert Williams, a trailblazing Bahamas-born performer. . . .Given the drama and beauty of his writing and the freshness of his insights into both personal and social conundrums regarding race and identity, Phillips is in a league with Toni Morrison and V. S. Naipaul.”—Booklist
From the author of the acclaimed two-volume comic-strip autobiography Persepolis comes this enlightening look into the sex lives of Iranian women. Embroideries gathers together MarjaneÂ’s female relatives for an afternoon of tea drinking and talking. Naturally, the subject turns to love, sex and the vagaries of men.
The Equations: Icons of Knowledge
by Sander Bais Harvard University Press Our Price: $18.95
In this book by the renowned Dutch physicist Sander Bais, the equations that govern our world unfold in all their formal grace--and their deeper meaning as core symbols of our civilization.
For Love of Insects
by Thomas Eisner Harvard University Press Our Price: $19.95
“Brimming with enthusiasm, Eisner reveals a world of unbelievable majesty and complexity in the simplest of insects. The photographs alone are worth the price of the book, but the text crackles with the electricity of a brilliant genius at work.”—Los Angeles Times
Jazz Abz: A Collection of Jazz Portraits from A to Z
by Wynton Marsalis Candlewick Press (MA) Our Price: $24.99
In a swinging improvisation with poster artist Paul Rogers, Wynton Marsalis celebrates the spirit of twenty-six stellar jazz performers, from Armstrong to Dizzy — and showcases the same number of poetic forms.
Left-Hand Turn Around the World: Chasing Mystery and Meaning of All Things Southpaw
by Da Capo Press Our Price: $23.95
Readers who believe that "only left-handed people are in their right minds" will want to join David Wolman on his left-hand turn around the world, in search of the origin and meaning of the lefty mystique.
Lincoln Lawyer: A Novel
by Michael Connelly Time Warner Our Price: $26.95
New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly delivers his first legal thriller — an incendiary tale about a cynical defense attorney whose one remaining spark of integrity may cost him his life.
The Lost Painting: The Search for a Caravaggio Masterpiece
by Jonathan Harr Random House Our Price: $24.95
An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars.
Lucian Freud: 1996-2005
by Lucian Freud Alfred A. Knopf Our Price: $75.00
The greatest living realist painter is how Robert Hughes described Lucian Freud in 1998. He is probably most famous as a portraitist, a portraitist above all of nudes. Stripped of their clothes, his sitters--mostly friends or family members--are revealed in all their vulnerability. Their gorgeously painted flesh is alive.
Now I Can Die in Peace: How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation, with a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank, and the 2004
by Bill Simmons ESPN Books Our Price: $24.95
"The Red Sox won the World Series." Once he was able to type those life-changing words, Bill Simmons decided to look back at his Sports Guy columns for the last five years to find out how the miracle came to pass.
Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are
by Frans De+Waal Riverhead Books Our Price: $24.95
In Our Inner Ape, Frans de Waal, one of the world’s great primatologists and a renowned expert on social behavior in apes, presents the provocative idea that our noblest qualities—generosity, kindness, altruism—are as much a part of our nature as are our baser instincts. After all, we share them with another primate: the lesser-known bonobo.
Penelopiad
by Margaret Atwood Canongate Books Our Price: $18.00
The story of Odysseus' return to his home kingdom of Ithaca following an absence of twenty years is best known from Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus is said to have spent half of these years fighting the Trojan War and the other half wandering around the Aegean Sea, trying to get home. But what of his wife, Penelope?
The Republican War on Science
by Chris Mooney Basic Books Our Price: $24.95
In the tradition of What Liberal Media? and What's the Matter with Kansas?, a stinging indictment of how one party has placed politics over science and embraced politically motivated pseudoscience.
Shakespeare
by Peter Ackroyd Doubleday Our Price: $30.00
Following his magisterial and ingenious re-creations of the lives of Chaucer, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, and Sir Thomas More, Ackroyd delivers his crowning achievement with this definitive and imaginative biographical masterpiece of William Shakespeare. “Ackroyd brings to his biographical reading the imaginative insights of a gifted poet and novelist, along with the passions of a scholar….Vivid and capacious, a life study worthy of its subject.”—Booklist
Short History of Myth
by Karen Armstrong Canongate Books Our Price: $18.00
"Human beings have always been mythmakers." So begins Karen Armstrong's concise yet compelling investigation into myth; what it is, how it has evolved, and why we still so desperately need it.
Specimen Days
by Michael Cunningham Farrar Straus Giroux Our Price: $24.00
In each section of Michael Cunningham's new book, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. A genre-bending, haunting, and transformative ode to life in our greatest city, this book is a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.
Atlas knows how it feels to carry the weight of the world; but why, he asks himself, does it have to be carried at all? And when you have eternity to ponder this question, the brief reprieve offered by Heracles — the only man strong enough to borrow the burden — can force you to demand an answer from the gods. But maybe the gods don't know the answer.
Women's Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present
by Lisa Grunwald Dial Press Our Price: $35.00
Historical events of the last three centuries come alive through these women’s singular correspondences–often their only form of public expression. In 1775, Rachel Revere tries to send financial aid to her husband, Paul, in a note that is confiscated by the British; First Lady Dolley Madison tells her sister about rescuing George Washington’s portrait during the War of 1812; one week after JFK’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy pens a heartfelt letter to Nikita Khrushchev; and on September 12, 2001, a schoolgirl writes a note of thanks to a
New York City firefighter, asking him, “Were you afraid?”