A Giver’s Guide to Good Reads

Trying to choose books for gifts can be daunting. A book is a very personal gift--after all, it is anticipated the recipient will spend hours reading it, all the while grateful to you .

In addition, people’s reading habits are not always what they seem. The squeeze on leisure time has resulted in much more specific reading patterns than in the past, says Judith Langer, whose New York-based Langer Associates studies consumer trends around the country.

Her research has identified three reader types:

* The purposeful readers: They want reading to be useful. They want to learn something. “They don’t want to waste their time,” says Langer.

* The impatient readers: “They are enraged if they can’t find the page numbers. They’re outta there if they can’t locate the index. They want substance, but it should be short and clear. They like factoids, graphs and charts.”

* The escapist readers: “Over and over in my research, I see the vegging-out trend,” said Langer. “People are so swamped with information they need a de-stressing break. There’s more interest in highbrow trash or serious pieces about silly celebrities. They call it their junk food. I call it ‘smart people / dumb books.’ ”

Purposeful? Impatient? Escapist? We checked with some national and local booksellers to see what they recommend this season.

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Chuck Robinson, president of the 4,500-member American Booksellers Assn. and owner of Village Books, Bellingham, Wash.:

Robinson says a recent Gallup poll found that more than half of American adults would like to receive a book for a gift. “I can’t think of any other item that more than half the population would want to get--it certainly wouldn’t be a tie,” he says.

As a gift for a purposeful reader, he picks “Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur” by Walter A. McDougall (Basic Books).

For the more impatient, he suggests “Native American Wisdom” (Running Press), a compilation of quotes from Native American leaders, illustrated with photographs by the noted 19th-Century Western photographer Edward S. Curtis.

For the escapist, Robinson likes “Prime Witness” by Steve Martini (Putnam), a courtroom drama. “This book is for the shopper who says ‘My father-in-law read all the John Grisham books and now I need something else. “‘

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Dan Christiaens, merchandising manager, Brentano’s, Century City:

“The typical holiday choice used to be a coffee-table book,” he says. “But it’s evolving now to a medium-priced biography or fiction. This, I think, is just an economic factor.”

His suggestions: “May It Please the Court” by Peter Irons and Stephanie Guitton (New Press), a $75 book and audiotape set containing excerpts from 23 landmark Supreme Court cases. “I’m expecting it to be the biggest selling high-dollar choice for the holidays,” says Christiaens.

His top choice for a gift is “Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs,” essays by Wallace Stegner (Viking Penguin).

For the reader who likes it brief and breezy, he proposes “Life’s Little Instruction Book” by H. Jackson Brown Jr. (Rutledge Hill), which has sold “unbelievably.” “For escapism,” he says, “just look at the fiction side of the bestseller lists.”

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Cynthia Cuzo, director of the Cultural Center at Midnight Special, Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica:

Cuzo polled the staff for gift ideas. Among their picks for the committed reader, “Black Athena” by Martin Bernal (Rutgers University Press), about the Egyptian contribution to classical civilization, and a book about Los Angeles, “Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City” by Jennifer Wolch and Michael Deer (Jossey-Bass Publishers).

On the lighter side, Midnight Special picks “Far Side Gallery 4” (Andrews and McMeel), Gary Larson’s newest collection of cartoons, and “The Hidden Life of Dogs” by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (Houghton Mifflin), a best-selling analysis of canine behavior.

Books by Walter Mosley (mysteries in South-Central Los Angeles), Sara Paretsky (female investigator in Chicago) or Octavia Butler (science fiction from an African American woman’s viewpoint) are all “off the beaten path and offer quality escapism,” says Cuzo.

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Miriam Bass, assistant vice president for merchandising, Crown Books, West Coast:

She likes “Downing Street Years” by Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins) and “Winner Within” (Putnam) by former Laker Coach Pat Riley.

For the frivolous: “Bare Facts Video” from Publishers Group West. “It’s a guide to looking up scenes where people are naked in movies--a bedside quickie if you just want to jump to the nude scenes on rented movies. It’s definitely geared to impatient people.”

On the more romantic side, she chooses “Robber Bride” by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday). “It’s straight fiction--a retelling of the robber bridegroom from a woman’s viewpoint. It’s sheer entertainment. It’s the perfect book for a woman.”

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Filis Winthrop, co-owner, Chavalier’s, Los Angeles:

“We’re a neighborhood bookstore and because of Paramount Studios we have a lot of writers and producers, who are serious readers,” she says. “I think reading is on the upswing because TV is so bad.”

She and her partner Linda Friedman suggest “History of Warfare” by Paul Keegan, (Knopf), “a scholarly but accessible look at mankind’s omnipresent cultural ritual.”

Others on their list are “Ditches of Edison County,” the pseudonymous Ronald Richard Roberts’ parody of “Bridges of Madison County” (Plume Books)--a week out and “selling like hotcakes”--and “Little Book of Famous Insults,” compiled by Susan Teltser-Schwarz (Peter Pauper Press)--a collection of put-downs by celebs ranging from Dorothy Parker to Johnny Carson. They also pick the best-selling books of Nick Bantock, who has a package out containing “The Golden Mean,” “Sabine’s Notebook,” and “Griffin and Sabine” (Chronicle Books).

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Richard LaBonte, West Coast manager, A Different Light bookstores, San Francisco and West Hollywood:

This store specializes in gay and lesbian literature from serious to comic. For escapist readers, LaBonte keeps science fiction and mystery counters at the front of the store. “Customers run right in and grab the new mystery by Katherine Forrest and dash home to read that evening.”

His suggested gift list: “Gay Issues in the Workplace” by Brian McNaught, (St. Martin’s Press); “Blossom of Bone: Recovering the Connection Between Homoeroticism and the Sacred” by Randy Conner (HarperCollins) and “Out in the World: Gay & Lesbian Life from Bangkok to Buenos Aires” by Neil Miller (Vintage).

On the lighter end of his list are “Members of the Tribe: Caricatures of Gay Men & Lesbians” by Michael Willhoite, (Alyson Publications); “Hothead Paison: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist,” a comic strip collection by Diane DiMassa, (Cleis Press); “Whores of Lost Atlantis,” a novel by playwright Charles Busch (Hyperion), and “Tales of the City” by Armistead Maupin, (HarperCollins).

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Anne Edkins, head book buyer, Vroman’s, Pasadena and Arcadia:

For the coffee table, Edkins chooses “Mission,” photographs of North America’s historic missions by Roger Kennedy (Houghton Mifflin), $45--”an incredibly beautiful architectural history.”

Also on her list is “The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millenium” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (HarperCollins), about happiness. For the crowd who wants the prose in bites, there’s “The Little Know-How Book” by Bob Scher (Harmony Books), a miscellany--how to introduce people, repair a lamp, parallel park.

Her favorite, she says, is “Saints Preserve Us! Everything You Need to Know About Every Saint You’ll Ever Need” by Sean Kelly and Rosemary Rogers (Random House). Find your saint--they’re listed in alphabetical order and by days and occupations, from Abdon (patron of barrel makers) to Zoe.

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Dave Dutton, owner, Dutton’s in North Hollywood and downtown:

For serious fiction readers, he suggests “Adrift on the Nile” or any of the other novels by Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner whose works have been translated and published by Doubleday. “He’s like the Tolstoy of Cairo,” says Dutton.

He also recommends “virtually any volume in the fairly new Library of America series.” Distributed by Penguin, the series offers nicely bound editions of works by such American authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Willa Cather and Jack London.

Others on Dutton’s gift list are “Upside Your Head! Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue” by Johnny Otis (Wesleyan University Press), “a wonderful cross section of the black music experience in Los Angeles” and “Hollywood du Jour: Lost Recipes of Legendary Hollywood Haunts” by Betty Goodwin (Angel City Press), containing pictures, recipes, menus and tidbits of trivia from the city’s legendary watering spots and the stars who frequented them.

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Sheldon McArthur, owner, Mysterious Bookshop, West Hollywood:

Mystery readers are “generally well-educated people and a cross section completely of society. They have gravitated to mysteries because they are finding some of the best and most talented writing being produced in the mystery genre,” he says.

He proposes the coffee table book “Danger is My Business” (Chronicle Books), an illustrated history of the dime detective pulp magazines.

In fiction, he likes “In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead” by James Lee Burke (Hyperion). “He’s one of the most important modern mystery writers today,” says McArthur.