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.
Areas of My Expertise
by John Hodgman Dutton Books Our Price: $22.00
Although bestsellers such as Poor Richard's Almanack and The Book of Lists are certainly valuable, they also were largely true. Here is a different kind of handy desk reference, one in which all of the historical oddities and amazing true facts are sifted through the singular, illuminating imagination of John Hodgman — which is the nice way of saying: He made it all up.
The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
by Vida Vendela McSweeney's Books Our Price: $18.00
This book is a collection of conversations between writers and their “mentors,” taken from the pages of The Believer, along with previously unpublished conversations. The term “mentors” is used loosely to suggest an informal kinship between a younger writer and a more experienced one.
Divided Kingdom
by Rupert Thomson Knopf Our Price: $24.95
Following The Book of Revelation—“a premise made terrifyingly real by a hugely talented writer,” wrote The New York Times Book Review—Rupert Thomson now explores a radical social experiment in a novel both politically provocative and personally mesmerizing. England's entire population is forcibly reorganized and relocated into autonomous zones according to psychology, or the four humors: choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic and sanguine.
Electric Michelangelo
by Sarah Hall Harper Perennial Our Price: $13.95
Cy Parks is the Electric Michelangelo, an artist of extraordinary gifts whose medium happens to be the pliant, shifting canvas of the human body. Fleeing his mother's legacy — a consumptives' hotel in a fading English seaside resort — Cy reinvents himself in the incandescent honky-tonk of Coney Island in its heyday between the two world wars. Amid the carnival decadence of freak shows and roller coasters, enchanters and enigmas, scam artists and marks, Cy will find his muse: an enigmatic circus beauty who surrenders her body to his work, but whose soul tantalizingly eludes him.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
by Rebecca Solnit Viking Books Our Price: $21.95
Rebecca Solnit's brilliant new book is about the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves.
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
by Laila Lalami Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill Our Price: $21.95
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits marks the debut of an exciting new voice in fiction. Laila Lalami evokes the grit and enduring grace that is modern Morocco. The book begins as four Moroccans illegally cross the Strait of Gibraltar in an inflatable boat headed for Spain. What has driven them to risk their lives? And will the rewards prove to be worth the danger?
There's Murad, a gentle, unemployed man who's been reduced to hustling tourists around Tangier; Halima, who's fleeing her drunken husband and the slums of Casablanca; Aziz, who must leave behind his devoted wife in hope of securing work in Spain; and Faten, a student and religious fanatic whose faith is at odds with an influential man determined to destroy her future.
Sensitively written with beauty and boldness, this is a gripping book about what propels people to risk their lives in search of a better future.
Last Gentleman Adventurer: Coming of Age in the Arctic
by Edward Beauclerk Maurice Houghton Mifflin Company Our Price: $25.00
At sixteen, Edward Beauclerk Maurice impulsively signed up with the Hudson's Bay Company — the Company of Gentleman Adventurers — and was sent to an isolated trading post in the Canadian Arctic, where there was no telephone or radio and only one ship arrived each year.
Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of M. F. K. Fisher
by Joan Reardon North Point Press Our Price: $27.50
In more than thirty books, M.F.K. Fisher forever changed the way Americans understood not only the art of eating but the art of living. Whether considering the oyster or describing how to cook a wolf, she addressed the universal needs "for protection, food, love."
The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon Penguin Our Price: $15.00
The Shadow of the Wind is a long novel that will remind readers of a good many other novels. This isn't meant as criticism but as an indication of the story's richness and intricacy. Before everything else, Carlos Ruiz Zafon's European bestseller is a book about a mysterious book, and its even more mysterious author. Try to imagine a blend of Grand Guignol thriller, historical fiction, occasional farce, existential mystery and passionate love story--then double it.
Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival
by Dean King Back Bay Books Our Price: $14.95
A crucial, forgotten chapter of American history--immortalized in a survivor's firsthand account that became one of the bestselling books in 19th-century America and influenced Abraham Lincoln's, thoughts on slavery--is brilliantly retold for a new generation.
Spice: The History of a Temptation
by Jack Turner Vintage Books USA Our Price: $14.95
Spice: The History of a Temptation is a history of the spice trade told not in the conventional narrative of politics and economics, nor of conquest and colonization, but through the intimate human impulses that inspired and drove it. Here is an exploration of the centuries-old desire for spice in food, in medicine, in magic, in religion, and in sex—and of the allure of forbidden fruit lingering in the scents of cinnamon, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, mace, and clove.
Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine
by Paul Collins Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Our Price: $24.95
A typical book about an American founding father doesn't start at a gay piano bar and end in a sewage ditch. But then, Tom Paine isn't your typical founding father. The firebrand Common Sense rebel of 1776, a radical on the run from execution in London, and a senator of revolutionary France, Paine alone claims a key role in the development of three modern democracies.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War
by Victor Davis Hanson Random House Our Price: $29.95
One of our most provocative military historians, Victor Davis Hanson juxtaposes an ancient conflict with our most urgent modern concerns to create his most engrossing work to date, A War Like No Other.