October is almost gone (we’ve had a lovely fall season here in Wheaton), and it’s time—if you haven’t done so already—to start thinking about Christmas gifts. If you are of a bookish disposition, you will be giving books (though not necessarily nothing but books) to kindred spirits on your list. You won’t be hard-pressed to come up with possibilities, I suspect, but you might enjoy hearing from a fellow booklover about a few titles that haven’t been on your radar.
I’ll start with a spy novel, David McCloskey’s The Seventh Floor, which I will be reviewing for the Washington Free Beacon. It’s the third novel in a series; I wrote a column for First Things about the first one, Damascus Station, in 2021. But what’s it about, you ask? Never mind. If you have a lover of espionage, fictional and nonfictional, on your gift-list, this is a winner.
Next, a beautifully produced volume from Yale University Press, Stone Circles: A Field Guide, by Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings. It really is a field guide, and if you know someone likely to visit some of the many sites covered in this astonishing compendium, all the better. But I loved the book even though I will never encounter these sites in person. Open at random and read a handful of entries; it stimulates the imagination with no huffing and puffing, no outlandish claims. You may end up keeping a copy for yourself and getting a second one for the friend or loved one you had in mind.
If you have followed me for a while, you know that one of my favorite writers is Diane Glancy, a Native American poet, novelist, and creator of hybrid works with elements of both poetry and prose, defying categorization. You may even recall that each October, I hold out hope that—defying all the prognosticators—she will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her latest book, one of her trademark unclassifiables, is Quadrille: Christianity and the Early New England Indians. The subtitle suggests something historical, essayistic—and this slim volume does indeed draw on a rich range of historical sources. If you open it and flip through some pages, you’ll see bits that appear to be straight prose, bits that appear to be poetry, and others with elements of both. If your gift-list includes a person or two deeply interested in this subject, as I am, someone who reads a lot about this vexed history, consider giving Quadrille to them even if they wouldn’t normally read such a book. (As with Stone Circles, you may end up getting a copy for yourself as well.)
Another writer I love, Lore Segal, died early this month; she was ninety-six. At the end of 1938, as a young girl, she was among the Jewish children who traveled via the Kindertransport from Germany, finding refuge in England. She came to the United States in 1951. Segal wrote fiction and “nonfiction”; she translated stories by the Brothers Grimm for a beautiful edition, many years ago, illustrated by Maurice Sendak; she wrote books for children. (I got a reissue of one of these, Tell Me a Mitzi, shortly before she died; my wife Wendy had enjoyed the book when we checked it out from the library ages ago, and I thought she’d like to revisit it; blessedly, she did, and so did I.) Before Segal’s death, the publisher Melville House had scheduled an American edition of a wonderful little book first published in the U.K. several years ago, The Journal I Did Not Keep: New and Selected Writing. For someone on your list, this could serve as an ideal introduction to a writer who might well become a favorite.
There are other books I could name here—I could go on and on in this vein for a good while, in fact, with no sense of strain—but I hope that at least one of these will strike you as a perfect Christmas gift for someone on your list. And if that does happen, I’d love to hear from you!
John Wilson is a contributing editor for the Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at the Marginalia Review of Books.
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