A cornucopia of books to give as gifts for friends, family or for yourself. Avoid the mall - give a book from this eclectic selection!
1. Amazing Everything: The Art of Scott C. by Scott Campbell
© Insight Editions
I fell in love with Scott Campbell's artwork when coming across "Igloo Head and Tree Head," a comic featuring monsters with various objects growing out of their heads, just one of the many fanciful notions that emerge in the watercolor illustrations that Campbell creates. His clever and funny artwork is of a sort that is ridiculously whimsical and entertaining - Medieval knights fighting huge blobby monsters, cavepeople soaring through the air in rock balloons, and E.T. playing on a slip-n-slide - to children of all ages. And Campbell is right on - tacos are more interesting than war is fun.
2. Bossypants by Tina Fey
© Reagan Arthur Books
Anyone who has laughed at Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live (in her sketches as Sarah Palin) and enjoyed her work in 30 Rock, will get a kick out of Bossypants, the actress/comedian's extremely funny memoir of her career in comedy. Even better - Bossypants is also available as an audio book, read by Fey herself, which would have to make it one of the most entertaining audio books around.
3. The Cult of LEGO by John Baichtal and Joe Meno
© No Starch Press
Imagine a history class in LEGO that leads students from the toys' invention in the Danish village of Billund back in 1958 through to the present day. The Cult of LEGO would be that class's textbook. Although frankly, text would not be the word to describe John Baichtal and Joe Meno's solid coffee table tome. The Cult of LEGO weighs in at nearly 300 pages, chock full of pictures of fascinating works of art, minifigs, and everything else surrounding the well-loved LEGO bricks. And after all, who doesn't love LEGO?
4. Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer
© Pomegranate
In 1968, Edward Gorey was contracted to illustrate a children's book written by Peter Neumeyer. The two met that summer and developed a close relationship, one that in no small part grew out of a correspondance via letters and postcards through the following fall. Now, in the internet age, when correspondance has largely been reduced to dashed-off emails, it is fascinating to see the collected thoughts on art, literature, and other wide-ranging subjects sent back and forth between these two brilliant thinkers. There is perhaps no better exploration of Edward Gorey, one of the most interesting artists of the 20th century.
5. Harry Potter Page to Screen: The Complete Filmmaking Journey by Bob McCabe
© Harper Design
At 540 pages (12.9 inches tall, 9.8 inches wide and 1.7 inches deep), Harry Potter Page to Screen is exhaustive in capturing the making of the Harry Potter movies. The book covers behind-the-scene aspects of the film-making journey including its casting, the direction process, costuming, set design, prop making, and special effects. It teems with lavish photographs, most of which were taken on-set during the making of the the eight Harry Potter movies, a collection that is a treasure by itself for many Harry Potter fans. But McCabe is true to his word in presenting the complete journey - Harry Potter Stage to Screen goes beyond fan worship to provide absolute detail on anything you'd want to know about how J.K. Rowling's work was so magically portrayed on film.
6. The Information by James Gleick
© Pantheon
From the talking drums of Africa through Morse, Babbage, and Turing, James Gleick takes readers on a journey through the evolution of how information is organized and quantified. Detailed enough for the student of information sciences, but accessible enough for the layperson, The Information is part survey course, part biography of the individuals who shaped this science, and in all an excellent introduction to phenomena that, whether we see it or not, has a huge impact on our lives today.
7. On Conan Doyle or The Whole Art of Storytelling by Michael Dirda
© Princeton University Press
Few know the breadth of Arthur Conan Doyle's creatie output beyond the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Michael Dirda sets out to remedy that in this short but engaging memoir. Two books in one, On Conan Doyle first introduces readers to the "Doyle nobody knows," Doyle's supernatural short stories, essays, and spiritualism, before diving into Dirda's own involvement with the Baker Street Irregulars, the most famous fan club of the works of Doyle and the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
8. Sex on the Moon by Ben Mezrich
© Doubleday
Ben Mezrich is the author of The Accidental Billionaires (the book about Facebook on which the movie The Social Network was based) and Bringing Down the House, about how a group of MIT students perfected a method of taking millions of dollars from Vegas casinos. In Sex on the Moon, he turns his attention to a different scam, one conceived of by Thad Roberts, an intern at NASA's Johnson Space Center, who purports an out-of-this-world heist of actual moon rocks, all to impress a girl.
9. Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell
© Riverhead
Never is learning history more entertaining than when the instructor is Sarah Vowell. This time, the author of The Partly Cloudy Patriot and The Wordy Shipmates, takes on the history of Hawaii, from its discovery by Captain James Cook in 1778 to the annexation of the archipelago by the United States (as a territory) in 1898. Included within are various cultural and pop cultural references (ties to the island for both Barack Obama and The Brady Bunch, for instance) as well as her own experience in Vowell's now-familiar sarcastic humor.
10. Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman (Illustrator)
© Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
This collaboration between writer Daniel Handler and artist Maira Kalman is the story of a break-up told in the form of a long letter from the teenaged Min(erva) to her ex-boyfriend, Ed. Told in the second person - "I'm tellling you why we broke up, Ed... the truth is that I goddamn loved you so much." - and punctuated with Kalman's still-life drawings of the detritus of a relationship, Why We Broke Up is an artistically vivid portrait of teenage romance.
