The Well-Read Reveler : Writers and Editors Describe the Agony and the Ecstasy of Book-Giving and Make a Few Suggestions : Writer’s Dilemma

Bookgiving is like kissing--a happy, natural impulse at holiday time. And yet, the true booklover knows how risky and difficult choosing a book to give can be. All love, after all, involves a sweet agony. Book love is no exception.

For example: Do we give books that we secretly want ourselves? Do we give books that we already love without regard for the recipient (known, in these cases, as the victim) or do we carefully consider our loved one and his or her reading peccadilloes and lovingly kowtow?

When I was younger, I had the suspicion that the books I was introduced to in school were not the real books, the secret ones whose pleasures would take me to another world. I started to read books that were loved by my favorite writers, and I began to keep lists of books that I loved beyond reason, books that would make a reader love them with crazy passion. At holidays, I would give those.

Of course, this brings up another whole range of problems. What happens when you give your very favorite secret book to someone special who doesn’t like it? Or worse, doesn’t read it? Can you ever talk to such a person again? Do you want to take that risk?

Writers themselves directed me to the real rich treasure of secret books. I am always indebted to Donald Barthelme for introducing me to the work of Grace Paley, to Ann Beattie for her recommendation of Steven Millhauser’s “Edwin Mullhouse,” to John Barth for Italo Calvino’s “Cosmicomics,” three all-time gifts on my personal list of books for trusted friends.

So I’ve phoned 10 writers and poets who live around Los Angeles to ask for their book lists. I quickly discovered their lists are divided between what Benjamin Weissman (whose first collection, “Dear Dead Person,” is being published this year) called “Old Standards,” and new discoveries. The Old Standards are the books you always give, the ones that won’t let you down. The newer books are trickier tests: Will the book make it to next year’s list? The recipient’s bliss or chilly indifference separates the one-time-only novelties from those in the Hall of Fame of permanent giveability.

My phone call to T. Coraghessan Boyle (“The Road to Wellness”) found him characteristically resolute: “The only gift I ever give to anyone at any time is books,” he declared, sounding like a Dickens character. “I like to give John McPhee’s ‘Coming into the County,’ and Evan Connell’s ‘Son of the Morning Star.’ My wife gets very beautiful books featuring illuminated manuscripts. Diane at Dutton’s (Brentwood) always squirrels them away for me. Last year the boys were 10 and 6, and I gave them ‘Old Yeller,’ which I read to them over the Christmas holiday with tears in my eyes. My daughter got ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘Nine Stories’ (by J.D. Salinger). May I add that at Christmas we go to the Sierra Nevada where we are without electronic media, and we read a lot more.”

Most of the writers were not as headstrong and ready as Boyle. Carol Muske Dukes (“Saving St. Germ,” “Red Trousseau”) charmed me by calling me back twice to add to her list, as if remembering all her favorites were a matter of great moment--which, of course, to a book lover, it is.

“I forgot Charles Baxter’s ‘First Light,’ which I’ve been giving people for years. And Alan Lightman’s ‘Einstein’s Dreams,’ a new discovery.” Then the next day: “I forgot ‘Annie John’ by Jamaica Kincaid, the best book about mothers and daughters I know, I always give it. I know you can’t use all of these, I promise not to call again.”

For some writers, personal history with a particular writer’s work comes into play. Ray Bradbury (“Green Shadows, White Whale” most recently) told me he wrote a letter to the great naturalist Loren Eisley in 1949, after reading his essay “The Fire Apes.” Bradbury suggested that Eisley write books. Since then, Eisley’s books, like “The Immense Journey” or “The Star Thrower,” have been standards on the Bradbury gift list. The poet David St. John (“Terraces of Rain”) is giving friends, among other books, one that his wife, the poet Molly Bendall, wrote with another poet, Gail Wronsky. “It’s called ‘Calamity and Belle: A Cowgirl Correspondence.’ And it cracks me up. They’ve written to each other in the personas of women in the Old West.”

Some writers’ personalities emerge as they describe a favorite book. Amy Gerstler (“Nerve Storm”), whose poems contain delicate details under fire from tension and despair, sounded very like her own poetry as she talked about “The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.” “It’s the diary of this smart and bitchy Japanese woman from the Heian court days, and it involves the aesthetics of everything--she has lists of odious things, beautiful things, sexy things. The hue of the underlayer of the kimono.”

The comically hostile Benjamin Weissman sounds a personal note when he says he likes to give “Outer Dark” by Cormac McCarthy. “It’s a great book for Christmas because it’s the meanest, creepiest book in the world.” He also likes to give Michael Lesey’s “Wisconsin Death Trip,” an illustrated history of funeral customs in the Midwest during the last century.

Personal backgrounds, too, show up in the recommendations. Brian Moore (“No Other Life”) recommended Flann O’Brien, the great comic Irish writer of “At Swim-Two-Birds” and “The Third Policeman.” With a bit of chagrin, he finds himself applauding Roddy Doyle’s new book “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.” “It’s Irish, too,” he says. David Wong Louie (whose book of stories “Pangs of Love” was given to me by two different friends last year--they had also bought it for each other) is getting friends Jessica Hagedorn’s anthology of Asian American writing, “Charlie Chan is Dead.”

Are writers nervous about the responses to the books they give? Not Susan Straight (“I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots”). “I’ll give (Toni Morrison’s) “Sula” to anybody. It’s short. It’s a great, magical book. When I read something that’s magic to me, I just hope other people will like it. None of the other people in my life are writers, and I don’t expect them to like things the same way I do.”

Below you’ll find, for convenience, a complete list of authors and suggestions. For those carefree people who can simply check over the best seller list and buy, you have my (slightly astonished) envy. For the rest of us, real book giving is a paradise of loving indecision.

T. Coraghessan Boyle

John McPhee, “Coming Into the Country”

Evan S. Connell, “Son of the Morning Star”

J.D. Salinger, “Catcher in the Rye” and “Nine Stories”

Ray Bradbury

Loren Eisley, any of his books

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Tender is the Night”

George Bernard Shaw, “St. Joan”

Ross Macdonald, any

Raymond Chandler, any

James M. Cain, any

Kate Braverman

Pablo Neruda, “Isla Negra”

Pablo Neruda, “Residence on Earth”

Octavio Paz, “The Collected Poems”

Literary Magazines: “The Kenyon Review,” “The American Voice,” “Southwest Review”

Amy Gerstler

“The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon”

“The Best American Essays”

David Wong Louie

Margaret Wise Brown, “Goodnight Moon”

Leslie Marmon Silko, “Ceremony” or “Almanac of the Dead”

Raymond Carver, “Where I’m Calling From”

Marilyn Chin, “Dwarf Bamboo”

Fae Myenne Ng, “Bone”

Cormac McCarthy, “All the Pretty Horses”

Jessica Hagedorn, editor, “Charlie Chan is Dead”

Brian Moore

Flann O’Brien, “At Swim-Two-Birds” or “The Third Policeman”

Jorge Luis Borges, “A Personal Anthology”

Roddy Doyle, “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha”

Tony Richardson, “The Long Distance Runner”

Carol Muske Dukes

Donald Hall, ed. “The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse”

Mona van Duyn, “Collected Poems”

Kay Boyle, “50 Stories”

Stevie Smith, “Novel On Yellow Paper”

Elizabeth Bowen, “The Beath of the Heart”

Charles Baxter, “First Light”

Jamaica Kincaid, “Annie John”

Alan Lightman, “Einstein’s Dreams”

David St. John

Rainer Marie Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet”

Jane Hirschfield, translator, “The Ink-Dark Moon”

Adrienne Rich, “What is Found There”

Molly Bendall and Gail Wronsky, “Calamity and Belle: A Cowgirl Correspondence”

Susan Straight

Toni Morrison, “Sula”

Jane Yolen, “Owl Moon”

Leslie Marmon Silko, “Ceremony”

Shirley Ann Williams, “Dessa Rose”

Robert Boswell, “Mystery Ride”

James Hall, “Hard Aground”

James Lee Burke, “In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead”

Benjamin Weissman

William Gass, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”

Denton Welch, “In Youth Is Pleasure”

John Hawkes, “Second Skin” or “Death, Sleep and the Traveler”

Thomas Bernhard, “The Loser” or “The Woodcutters”

Cormac McCarthy, “Outer Dark”

Michael Lesey, “Wisconsin Death Trip”

Bernard Cooper, “A Year of Rhymes”

Dennis Cooper, “Frisk”

Robert Walser, “Collected Stories”