Lucy’s Christmas, written by Donald Hall and illustrated by Michael McCurdy (David R. Godine, 978-1-56792-342-1) is the story of Donald Hall’s mother, Lucy, a stove, and a rural Christmas in 1909. Beautifully illustrated by scratching away the black to reveal bright colors beneath, this book is a gem, particularly for families whose traditions include church.

Another story based on a family story is Eli Remembers by Ruth Vander Zee and Marian Sneider, illustrated by Bill Farnsworth (Eerdmans Books, 978-0-8028-5309-7). A more apt title might have been, Eli Finds Out, for the boy discovers why his grandparents are so sad on Rosh Hashanah. A journey to Lithuania and the Ponar Forest provide the answer. Unsentimental and yet full of feeling, from the texture of the illustrations to the layout of the text, this is a good book for introducing history within the family.

The Sheltering Cedar by Anne Marshall Runyon (Portal Press, 978-1-933454-02-3) mostly takes place on Ocracoke Island, one of the Barrier Islands off the North Carolina coast. On the island, an old cedar tree, bent from the fierce nor’easters, shelters the creatures of the beach, just like a harbor shelters boats and a house shelters people. Cardinals, plovers, beetles, and toads decorate the pages of this book’s Christmas pages.

Kate DiCamillo, Newberry Medal winner, joins with illustrator Bagram Ibatoulline to create the story of Frances, a little girl in Cincinnati whose father is away, fighting in World War II. DiCamillo doesn’t actually tell the reader this, but through the carefully crafted illustrations in Great Joy (Candlewick, 978-0-7636-2920-5), Frances’s concern for an organ grinder strike a chord. This is a wonderful story about the spirit of Christmas, so often lacking in our contemporary commercial holiday.

Finally, I can’t resist this The Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore (Candlewick, 978-0-7636-3469-8). The inky illustrations, reminiscent of 19th century cut-outs, are both crisp and frothy. Every single ornament on the Christmas tree sparkles and intrigues! At least as delightful is the biography of the illustrator, Niroot Puttapipat, who is the son of a Thai princess. This new version of an old favorite perfectly combines nostalgia and high-tech, with its two-dimensional graphics and its three-dimensional pop-ups.

Luddites, I thought. Remember when the first digital typewriters came out? You could see about 16 characters on a tiny screen embedded just above the keyboard, and as long as you made changes there, it wouldn’t print on the special coated paper. Sounds laborious and nitpicky nowadays, but I was so happy to be rid of the Olivetti; its racket, its physicality. The digital was like a whisper of footsteps accompanying the smoke from my cigarettes.

All right, so I take the Sony Reader home, I download a couple of Sherlock Holmes stories from Gutenberg.org, I plug the Reader into my Mac…. Hah! I should have known better. No Mac support.

But, I’m used to this kind of stuff. I’ve had Macs since 1989. Easy enough to Google “mac support for sony reader” and download some free software. (What gets me is, if it’s so easy (free), then why don’t these gadget-makers include it in their software package in the first place?) That done, I’m hooked up… But can I upload my new books from Gutenberg? No. Need more freeware for that. Finally, I’m all loaded and ready to test drive.

Huge disappointment. Sherlock Holmes is visible on the Reader, but only barely. The type is miniscule no matter how much I magnify. This means that I’m stuck with the partial books that came loaded on the Reader, or I’ve got to go to Sony website and pay for their exclusive product. But wait! I can’t, because it doesn’t support Macs.

A couple of weekends ago, I was in a BestBuy with my thirteen-year-old. I needed a powercord for my iPod and he was browsing. He liked the new Sony PSP where he could play games, listen to music, watch movies. But can he move his iTunes files over to the PSP? No. Can he even plug the thing into a Mac? No.

Honestly, I don’t understand this intolerance and exclusivity among gadget makers. Google seems to have the right idea with the announcement a couple of weeks ago of its Open Handset Alliance software that will run on any phone, and will, I presume, make every cellphone a mini pc. With the obvious trend in electronics moving away from in-home, in-office, physical gadgetry and storage, it seems to me that the first guy to market a device that runs everything wins.

Who wants a collection of movies taking up space when there’s NetFlix and InDemand? Who wants to buy a whole album when you can cherrypick? Why do I want to buy the brand new Amazon Kindle when I can already read papers and (expensive) books on my iPod, and email, watch TV, movies, listen to music? Why do I want another product that forces me to purchase their exclusive book product?

I don’t.

But wait a minute. Take a step back. Last Sunday, I didn’t read a book. Not one. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t read. In fact Sunday is the day for combing the NYT Magazine—online. I also catch up on the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Online. Every day I read the plain old New York Times and the Guardian online. I cancelled my subscription to the local paper over a year ago because the reading-to-waste ratio was too awful. Now, I scan the headlines—online—and my recycling box is a lot lighter.

The point here is that just because a poll says one thing, you can’t presume it says a whole lot of other things. Just because Americans aren’t reading books doesn’t mean that they’re not reading.

So a friend of mine stopped by a few days ago and gazed around the living room at the wall-to-wall books. He’s a musician, and his comment was: I have thousands of CDs, but I don’t want them taking up space in the studio anymore. I don’t need to be able to see them in order to access their information. My collection is digitized and accessible wherever, whenever from my iPod. How would you feel about having your entire collection of books in your pocket?

I admit that my reaction was visceral. It was that pain of loss when your organs shrink away from your skin. My books are so much more than a collection of words. They are more than mere devices that display text. They are—artifacts. Some of them smell like one place, and some like another. The old Jane Eyre that’s been through every major move of the last thirty years is so worn out it’s unreadable. Still, I wouldn’t dream of throwing it away. It’s an old friend. They’re all old friends. I know where I was when I read them first, or last. I know on what side of the spread memorable passages occur.

But wait a minute. Didn’t records used to be like this? I recall staring at Pink Floyd’s The Wall, prominently displayed, while listening to the same. Long before that hazy afternoon, however, 8-tracks were already in our family’s car, and by the time I was in college, cassette tapes had taken over. Good thing, we said, as we took off to Mexico with a stash of music in a shoebox instead of a crate. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve felt any physical connection to my music collection. Unlike with my books, I don’t know who’s sitting next to whom. I don’t care. The ease of accessibility has overwritten the pleasure of spatial conviviality.

Or is it that there’s no sense of loss because the records have been gone for so long?

The definition of artifact is, something created by humans for practical purposes. Records are no longer practical. CDs are no longer practical. Newspapers are no longer practical. And when the right, cross-platform, display device comes along, most books will no longer be practical.

All right, so books may no longer be artifacts, still, not all books are meant to be practical. On another recent Sunday, my youngest son woke up early, and finding himself in a quiet house, browsed the bookshelves nearest the floor. He found a hardcover first edition of Animal Farm—a hand-me-down from a defunct family library—and he sat on the couch under a blanket and read the whole thing before breakfast. I think he’ll remember the experience forever. The book of paper and ink may cease to be a tool, but it will never stop being a gift, a memento, or a treasure.

“Attention spans are getting shorter, thanks to clutter,” Seth Godin wrote in his blog a while back. “In 1960, the typical stay for a book on the New York Times bestseller list was 22 weeks. In 2006, it was two.”

Here are three books to draw out an afternoon. All of them would make superb gifts.

A Beautiful Book

Fifty Uncommon Birds of the Upper Midwest
Watercolors by Dana Gardner
Text by Nancy Overcott
University of Iowa Press
978-1-58729-590-4

This book is beautifully designed, beautifully written, beautifully illustrated. A wonderful gift for the birder by the winter fireside.

“The sparser the food, the farther south snowies migrate. When they reach as far as southern Minnesota, they are often starving, which was particularly true during an unusually early winter irruption in 2005. Whenever I see these magnificent creatures from the Artic in my area, I am aware that my opportunity comes at a hard time for the birds.”

An Undefinable Book

Unrecounted
Poems by W.G. Sebald
Translation by Michael Hamburger
Art by Jan Peter Tripp
New Directions
978-0-8112-1726-2

W.G. Sebald liked to illustrate his novels with blurry black and white photos, but he’s quite clear in his essay defending the art of Jan Peter Tripp, that realism does not equal superficiality.

Here the poetry does the illustrating. Sometimes humorous, sometimes devastating, Sebald’s words speaks to the gaze of Tripp’s portraits. “And painting, what is it, anyway, if not a kind of dissection procedure in the face of black death and white eternity?” —W.G. Sebald on Jan Peter Tripp

So, when the optic nerve
tears, in the still space of the air
all turns as white as
the snow on the Alps.
    —After Nature, W.G. Sebald


A Completely Amusing Book, in the Best Sense

Men of Letters, People of Substance
Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
Preface by Francine Prose
David R. Godine
978-1-56792-338-4

“A letter is much more than a representation of a symbol, a letter depicts a time period, a certain mood and perhaps, in this book, the soul of the artist,” says Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich in his introduction. James Joyce, then, is represented with the font Baskerville, with its early industrial ironwork fancy. Tennessee Williams, born thirty years later, gets Bookman, a Baskerville with swagger. And look at Flaubert… Can’t you just hear him say: “I am Madame Bovary.”
 

This is a book for designers, writers, readers, and puzzlers. The last half is filled with word play, portraits that face off with titles like “Nice” and “Naughty,” “Passive” and “Aggressive.” (Hint: the “Passive” face has a baby’s butt for a nose.) Totally delightful and worthy of close in(tro)spection.