10 Days of Giftmas

Dawn DeVries Sokol has solicited the sketches, notes, doodles, and paintings from the journals of artists around the world. If you've never kept a journal of your writing or drawing - this book will move you to do so. If you do journal, 1000 Artist Journal Pages will reinvigorate that practice. In fact, with more than 300 pages of scanned artist journal pages, whatever form of artistic expression you prefer, this book will inspire you in it.

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Two centuries of American environmental writing, from nature writing to ecologist memoirs to essays on overpopulation. It's all in this beautiful book, this squat tome all about where writers meet the Earth. Included are offerings from about a hundred writers in all and 80 pages of photos and illustrations.

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John Adams is an icon of contemporary classical music, whose name is often mentioned alongside other composers similarly rooted in the minimalist movement such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Hallelujah Junction is Adams' autobiography, a well-crafted account of one extraordinary composer's journey and a roadmap through 20th century American music, part memoir and part explication and dissection of the creative process - an excellent gift for eclectic music lovers.

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Each year at a series known as the Last Lecture, a Carnegie Mellon University faculty member is asked to deliver what would hypothetically be a final speech to their students before dying. For Randy Pausch, it wasn't hypothetical. Pausch's inspirational last lecture has been viewed over 10 million times and is now a best-selling book elaborating on the theme "achieving your childhood dreams."

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The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008 upholds O. Henry's tradition of terrific short prose with its eclectic mix of well-known authors like Anthony Doerr and Alice Munro and the work of relatively unknown writers that bubbled to the top of the year's entries. A must-have for short fiction lovers.

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On Reading is a book of sixty-six photographs taken by Andre Kertesz between 1915 and 1970 all of which celebrate the universal and personal act of reading. On Reading, with its various subjects in various locales - a woman on a rooftop, an elderly man in a haphazard library, shoeless boys on a sidewalk - all connected by the act of reading, transports the viewer, much as the act of reading transported the subjects of these pictures.

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In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell dissected the phenomena of social epidemics; and in Blink, he discussed the nature of split-second decision-making. In Outliers, Gladwell, the founding father of pop-sociology, examines high-achieving individuals and questions what makes them different from everyone else.

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The Armitage family stories are stories of a seemingly ordinary British family to whom magical things seemed to happen regularly. Collected here for the first time are all of Joan Aiken's twenty-four Armitage family stories, four of which have never been published before. These are short stories for children which, with their mix of magic, myth, and humor, appeal broadly to adults as well.

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State by State is beautifully bound as something approximating a 1950's textbook and contains essays on 50 states by 50 writers. Each contribution adds something unique to this collection of geographic essays with styles that range from Anthony Doerr's lyrical meditation on the Tukudeka Indians of Idaho to Jonathan Franzen's imagined conversation with New York State's publicist. The individual pieces, often eccentric and personal, are best taken one a day with adequate rumination before attempting to digest another.

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Twilight tells the story of Bella, the new teenager at school, who meets and falls in love with Edward, one of a small group of teenage vampires who keep strictly to an animal diet, having renounced human prey. Romance and horror ensue. If the YA reader on your gift list is not already firmly ensconced in the Twilight Saga, ensconce them.

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