The Point’s Book-Gifting Guide for Normies (and Beyond)
Plus our 2023 guide, rescued from the depths of email
Every case for and against the gift guide has been made by now. We do not dispute that the wisest gifting strategies are long-term, and that gift guides are better understood as reading experiences than tools. But we do know a little something about reading experiences, and maintain that gifting books that recipients might actually want to read—and that are actually pretty good—is an art few have mastered.
Whether you’re looking for practical advice or simply seeking idle literary pleasure in the run-up to the holidays, we’ve collected here both our 2023 book gifting guide—compiled for our primary newsletter before we had a Substack—and a new slate of recommendations for 2025.
This year’s list
For the discerning commuter: Give them a pairing of portable books so engrossing they’ll nearly miss their stop. Janet Lewis’s The Wife of Martin Guerre and William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow: quiet, stirring portraits of ethical quandaries. Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man and John Keene’s Annotations: evocative prose experiments, one at a breakneck mythic register and one sensitive and grounded in St. Louis. Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent and Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory: two vicious and vigorous metafictional confections. Last, two works of nonfiction, Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues and Ágota Kristóf’s The Illiterate: the former full of wisdom worn lightly, the latter less a book than a spare series of reluctant utterances, of the kind that only genius novelists can write.
For the BookToker: Esther Yi’s Y/N. A novel that takes fandom as a departure point into a feverish philosophical investigation into the irrationalities of selfhood. That’s an abstract way of saying it’s about a young woman who derails her life over a Kpop star.
Consider also: Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin (steely and fashionable but ultimately sincere) or Renee Gladman’s My Lesbian Novel (a rare example of heartfelt, guileless experimentation)
For the Nuzzigate obsessive who won’t stoop so low as to read American Canto: Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest (featuring a requisite abundance of Kennedys) or Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (overexposed but still great—come for the salad dressing recipe, stay for the Watergate spoilers)
Consider also: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (no, really!); Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives (an eternal Point rec); The Dolphin Letters (see below); Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (duh)
For your Abundance-pilled uncle: Our own Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small, frankly. And—why not?—Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. This reader has had enough lucid writing. What he needs is brilliance.
For the poetic toddler: Dahlov Ipcar’s Lobsterman. Give your child a book that will both command and reward their attention, starting with this Maine classic known for its stunning artwork and extreme technical detail about lobstering. Then when they turn twelve you can give them Consider the Lobster.
Consider also: Burt Dow, Deep Water Man (underrated Robert McCloskey book, also has incredible illustrations); Nelly Stephane’s Roland or Kaya Doi’s Chirri & Chirra (both delightful introductions to translated literature!)
For the “brodernist”: Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul, or Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings. Johnson’s unshowy two-volume masterpiece is motivated by a different kind of maximalist formal ambition: to show day by day what being a devout reader has to do with being a citizen, and how to make sense of how everyday life gets processed into what we call history. Gray’s is iconic, forbiddingly Scottish, and still doesn’t have the reputation outside the U.K. that it deserves, which should be alluring for the foreign-lit fetishizer. And Brodkey’s will lure them back to the U.S.: it’s a plotless tome packed with long, European sentences and an uncertain reputation. Perhaps this giftee will be the one to dedicate themselves to championing it as a work of genius! As for Mailer’s: this obsessively plotted Egyptian mythic novel is “one of the filthiest things I’ve ever read,” noted one staffer. What could go wrong? Better yet, get in the brodernist spirit and buy the entire stack.
For the romantasy fan looking to branch out: Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban. Who needs the omegaverse when you have a hunky green swamp creature? Or Marian Engel’s Bear. Who needs the omegaverse when you have… an actual bear?
For the outdoorsy type: Frank Waters’s The Man Who Killed the Deer. This novel, about a Taos Pueblos man who gets in trouble with the Forest Service for poaching deer on protected land, verges on sentimental, but its handling of the American landscape in a political and spiritual context is utterly singular.
For the California dreamer tiring of Didion: Gavin Lambert’s The Goodby People. A languid, melancholic vignette of sixties Los Angeles by an Oxbridge man who moved to LA to be Nicholas Ray’s assistant, the novel manages to be less burdened by the specter of East Coast intellectualism or neurosis than either Didion or Babitz.
For someone in search of a classic that’s just as satisfying as TV (or short-form video): Jane Austen’s Emma (the original Bachelorette! and so pleasurable a novel it feels almost indecent) or Henry James’s The Bostonians (so vicious to everyone involved, so gossipy, so fun).
For the Literary Man: Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band’s New Threats from the Soul. What if the literary men are writing country songs instead of novels? Sidestep the discourse and give this extraordinary—and highly literary—new album of Americana instead.
For your friend worried about AI takeover: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot and Other Tales—features “The Sandman,” perhaps the earliest instance of an AI girlfriend in literature.
For someone who wants a book they don’t feel obligated to finish: A particularly relatable feeling during the hectic leisure of the holiday season. This is precisely what books of letters are for: there is no pressure to finish them in a timely fashion, their frequent lapses into banality and domesticity are absorbing but require no memory of what happened ten pages ago, and they provide a revealing glimpse into the contingencies of fame and creation. Examples include: for the literary modernist, The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore; for the Moomin enthusiast, Letters from Tove; for civilians seeking to understand the interests of the median literary magazine staffer, The Dolphin Letters; for the tortured soul, Kafka’s Letters to Felice; for the new parent and budding children’s lit aficionado, Dear Genius; for the political historian, The Holmes-Laski Letters. The options are endless.
And a few more quick hits…
For the teen longing for a good coming-of-age-novel: Michael Clune’s Pan
For the fantasy reader: M. John Harrison’s Viriconium or The Course of the Heart
The intellectual-history doorstoppers: David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, Brandon Terry’s Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope, or Scott Spillman’s Making Sense of Slavery
For the bookish cook: The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (both more charming and more practical than you’d expect) or Ronald Johnson’s Simple Fare and The American Table (the Alice Waters of experimental Midwestern poets)
For the hiker: Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain
For babies: Arati Rao and Adam Sipe’s Tic Toc
For the Adam Curtis fan (and/or Harper’s subscriber): Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana
For the doomer: Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope
For the future English major who still writes essays without ChatGPT: Rosalind Brown’s Practice
A political thriller without pretensions: David McCloskey’s Damascus Station
For the DOGE’d bureaucrat: Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses or Kafka’s The Castle
A twofer for the new Percival Everett fan who picked up James because it won the Pulitzer: Everett’s Erasure (far superior to the film adaptation) and Richard Wright’s Native Son (a canonical-yet-underrated American novel of ideas that will also clue you in more to what Everett, who is also a true novelist of ideas, is up to)
For the mom stressed out about her stack of unread New Yorkers: Jamaica Kincaid’s Talk Stories, Diane Johnson’s The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, or Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed
Gifting Books 101: Our original recommendations from 2023
The literary page-turner that isn’t by Elena Ferrante: Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver or Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. One is a tense psychodrama about sociopaths in frigid landscapes; the other is a harrowing investigation of the futility of seeking answers, solace and revenge. Both are short, propulsive and genius.
For the guy who liked Oppenheimer: Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC. (It’s better than the Elon Musk biography.)
For the Joe Rogan listener: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts. Fermor is the bold, curious, late-modern everyman-hero this guy’s been looking for.
For your friend who just started going to therapy: George Makari’s Revolution in Mind. The best (and most readable) history of psychoanalysis out there.
For your friend who’s been in therapy for a few years: Janet Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
For the celebrity gossip hound: Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives or Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me. Living is a creative act; pair these books for a unique object lesson in how this creativity is born of restraint.
For the friend who thought the Britney Spears book was too short: Patti Smith’s A Book of Days
For the niece who watches TikTok videos about beauty-product dupes: Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company or Eve’s Hollywood. Sure to capture the imagination of a person of taste and discernment (and canniness) limited by their means. Also consider Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book—“secretly such a bitchy teen girl book,” in the words of one editor.
The toddler book that doesn’t bore the parent on the hundredth read: John Burningham’s Would You Rather... Even a Maurice Sendak book will eventually succumb to rote repetition. But questions like “Would you rather serve dinner to a rude cat or a polite cat?” will never grow old.
And a few more quick hits...
Does your dad like Sapiens? David Graeber’s Debt
The upscale thriller for the James Patterson reader: Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series or Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories
The Harry Potter alternative for the young reader: Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series or Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci series
For the sports obsessive: Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch
For the devout birder: J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine
For the devout birder who’s also a little weird: T.H. White’s The Goshawk
For the true-crime fanatic who might also be a nostalgic Gen X dad: Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards or Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary
For the recently dumped who won’t find comfort in feel-good Christmas flicks: Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story
For the history buff disappointed by Ridley Scott’s Napoleon: Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety
For the mom stressed out about her stack of unread New Yorkers: Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, Magda Szabó’s Abigail or Margo Jefferson’s Negroland
Further guidance from our archive…
Anastasia Berg on what a Jew ought to do during Christmas
Apoorva Tadepalli on the anxious choreography of the Gift Exchange
And an obligatory link to our own web shop
A very fun list. I see so many favorites on here and many others I'm intrigued by!