Lucas Blogs About Books's Unhelpfully Specific Holiday Gift Guide
To clarify, these are books I gave to other people, which I guess is obvious from the fact that I only used two kinds of wrapping paper. Is there any gift better than a book? A book you'll actually read? Fair point, Hypothetical Reader. Anyway, Christmas is coming up and I thought I might talk about some of the books I'm giving people as gifts and why. Seems a tad indulgent . Agreed. For your sixteen-old-brother who never really seems that enthusiastic about reading: I went with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick . I think this book has a lot to offer, even to people who don't necessarily think of themselves as readers. First of all, it's a sci-fi/detective noir that deals with questions of environmentalism and what it means to be human. Dick isn't the world's greatest prose writer, but his work is often more about the ideas involved anyway. There's plenty of action and intrigue, plus there's a famous movie adaptation...