The 12 best gift books of the year — the trick is to match the pages to the person
A perfect gift book is not for reading. Not now. You don't want to give someone a book, watch them flip through monochromatic text, put it aside with a flat smile then promise to let you know what they think - five days, six months, nine years, from now? Do this right and they'll curl into the pages, blocking you out immediately. Which isn't to say avoid giving book books this holiday - books that tell stories, rely on literature, letters and sentences - but rather, a perfect gift book offers a bit more, a personal connection, a history, a quirk, a tasteful box biding together a complete something or other, or just a shape or size so unusual the person receiving the gift has no choice but to bond with it.
This needn't get expensive.
A couple of times I've given my daughter a book from British publisher Folio Society, which offers some affordable keepsakes of classics like "Anne of Green Gables" (in the $50-ish range). She can't read yet but she stares at the illustrations (created exclusively
