12 Holiday Gifts That Writers Will Actually Use

Lists Notable Articles
December 5, 2011 | 4 books mentioned 41 6 min read

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coverIn “Aren’t You Dead Yet?”, one of the stories in Elissa Schappell’s new collection, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, the narrator, an aspiring writer, receives a black, leather-bound journal as a gift from her best friend. Although she loves the look of the journal, she never writes in it. When her friend discovers this, he’s angry, and even accuses her of slacking off:

I tried to explain that I hadn’t written in it because I loved it so much and I didn’t want to ruin it. The pages were so nice, and sewn in, you couldn’t just rip them out. Whatever stupid thing I wrote down would be in there permanently.

This passage reminded me of the many beautiful blank journals I’ve received over the years, journals I’ve never used. Whenever I fill up one of my trusty spiral notebooks, I go through the stack and tell myself I’m finally going to start using them. But then I think of sullying those pristine, unlined pages with my half-formed thoughts, and I feel as guilty as the narrator in Schappell’s story.

Unfortunately, the same guilt intrudes on many of the other lovely writerly gifts I’ve received. At the risk of sounding ungrateful, I confess that I have a lot of nice pens I never use, because I’m afraid of chewing on them; a lot of classic novels I haven’t read because I feel guilty about not having read them; and a lot of inspirational writer’s guides I never read, because what if I’m not inspired?

None of these gifts are offensive, and no one will begrudge you for giving them. But they are boilerplate gifts. Writers get blank journals for the same reasons that teachers get mugs, assistants get flowers, and grandmothers get tea. If you want to give the writer in your life something he or she will truly adore, here are twelve ideas:

1.  A Cheesy New Bestseller

covercoverOne of the best presents I ever got was The Nanny Diaries. I really wanted it, but there were over 300 people on the library’s waiting list (I live in New York), and I wasn’t going to shell out $25 for something I was unlikely to read twice. The funny thing is, I never told my roommate that I wanted to read The Nanny Diaries. She just guessed that I had a secret craving for it. Of course, it can be as hard to gauge your friend’s taste in pop culture as it in high culture, but it’s better to guess wrong in the pop culture arena, because your friend is more likely to exchange it for something she likes better. Whereas, if you give her Gravity’s Rainbow, she’ll keep it for years out of obligation.

2.  Good lipstick

Writers are often broke. If they have $30 to spare, they are going to spend it on dinner, booze, or new books. Not lipstick. But writers are pale from spending so much time inside and could use some color. Make-up can be a tricky gift because it suggests that you think your friend’s face could use improvement. That’s why it’s important to go to a department store make-up counter and buy something frivolous and indulgent, like a single tube of red lipstick or some face powder or blush in a nice-looking case.

3.  Foreign language learning software

Most writers wish they knew more languages. It can also be relaxing to be rendered inarticulate in a new language, in that it offers a real break from personal expression, nuance, and irony. At the same time, learning a new language sharpens your native tongue, and expands your vocabulary. It’s sort of like cross training. Although language classes with live instructors are generally more effective than computer programs, I prefer software because it allows me to take the class on my own time and at my own pace.

4.  A Bathrobe

John Cheever famously donned a suit every morning in order to write. But as Ann Beattie recently revealed, and as a generation of bloggers already knows, most writers wear awful clothing while they are working. Help your writer friend out by giving her a beautiful robe to cover up her bizarre ensembles. Even if she already has one, she probably hasn’t washed it in a long time, and could use another.

5.  A Manicure

I bite my nails, especially when I’m writing. I’ve noticed that a lot of other writers have suspiciously short nails, too. Manicures help. Also, manicures get writers out of the house—and off the internet.

6.  “Freedom”, the internet-blocking software

“Freedom” is a computer program that blocks the internet on your computer for up to eight hours. I don’t understand why it’s effective, since it’s relatively easy to circumvent, but as soon as I turn it on, I stay off the internet for hours at a time. (There is also a program called “Anti-social”, which only blocks the social parts of the internet, like Facebook and Twitter.)

7.  Booze, coffee, and other stimulants

Find out what your friend likes to drink and buy a really nice version of that thing. Wine can be tricky, but we are living in an age of over-educated clerks, so don’t be afraid to ask for help. If your friend is a coffee or tea drinker, find out how he brews it and buy him really good beans or tealeaves. Even better, find out what cafe he frequents and see if they sell gift certificates.

8.  Yoga Classes

Yoga does wonders for anxiety, depression, and aching backs, three common writerly afflictions. Most yoga classes also incorporate some kind of meditation practice, which is also very helpful.

9.  A pet

In a recent Atlantic blog post containing advice from world’s most prolific writers, a character from one of Muriel Spark’s novels is quoted, describing why cats are good for writers: “If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat… The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.” Another prolific writer, Jennifer Weiner, recommends dogs on her website, where she’s posted a list of tips for aspiring writers. Dogs, she explains, foster discipline, because they must be walked several times a day. Furthermore, Weiner notes, walking is as beneficial for the writer as it is for the dog: “While you’re walking, you’re thinking about plot, or characters, or that tricky bit of dialogue that’s had you stumped for days.”

Obviously, a pet should not be given casually, or even as a surprise, but it’s worth considering, especially if you hear of an already-trained dog or cat that needs a new home.

10.  Freezable homemade foods: casseroles, soups, breads, and baked goods.

This is a potentially Mom-ish gift, but if your friend is on deadline, a new parent, or just far from home during the holidays, a home-cooked meal could be a lovely gesture. I emphasize freezable because it should be something that you make at home and leave with your friend to eat later. If you can’t cook, buy a pie.

11.  A hand-written letter

I know how corny this sounds, but many writers, especially fiction writers, still get a fair amount of rejection notes via the U.S. mail. You can easily make your friend’s day by sending an old-fashioned, chatty letter or even just a holiday card.

12.  The Gift, by Lewis Hyde

cover The Gift examines the role of artists in market economies, taking the lives of two major American poets as case studies. It’s the perfect antidote to all the earnest, helpful guides that aim to teach writers how to be more publishable, saleable, and disciplined. Where most writing guides make writers feel they could succeed if only they were more productive and efficient, The Gift argues that productivity and efficiency are market-based terms that have little meaning in gift economies, which is where many creative writers exchange and share their work. Another way of putting it is to say that The Gift makes feel writers feel less crazy.

Bonus: 10 MORE Holiday Gifts That Writers Will Use

(Image: Project 365 #263: 200911 Kept Under Wraps… from comedynose’s photostream)

is a staff writer for The Millions and the author of Home Field. Her short stories have appeared in The Southern Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Chattahoochee Review, among others. Read more at hannahgersen.com or sign up for her newsletter here.

Lists

Winners, Declared: A Take on The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 by One Under 40

Lists
October 20, 2010 | 4 books mentioned 3 5 min read
Maybe there are not enough lists in the world. In that spirit, now that the entire series has been published, I address The New Yorker’s “20 under 40,” by refining it down to an even thinner and more rarified number.  Is this possible, the reader may ask—or prudent?  Why not try, I say to the first question, and prudent, who knows: if it were a contest, the following are those I would declare winner and runners up.  But it is not a contest, and perhaps all this choosing actually reflects is one reader’s head and heart.  So let me ask: fiction, fiction, what do you make of me? 5.  Nicole Krauss “The Young Painters” (from Great House) After viewing a painting in the bedroom of her male acquaintance, a married New York City writer makes use of a tragedy that befell him in childhood: two close friends of his, the creators of the painting, were fed sleeping pills and burned to death in a forest by their suicidal mother.  With the proverbial fine-toothed brush, Krauss’s story succinctly unknots the psychological effects of necessary borrowing in the life of a writer. We move from initial obsession (“In the taxi home that night, I continued to think about that mother and her children: the wheels of the car softly rolling over the pine needles on the forest floor, the engine cut in a clearing, the pale faces of those young painters asleep in the back seat, dirt under their fingernails.”) to a sort of catharsis (“[It was] as if by writing about them I had made them disappear.”) to the beginnings of reckoning (“In her work, the writer is free of laws.  But in her life, Your Honor, she is not free.”). Rendered as testimony in a courtroom, Krauss’s story probes questions of guilt and innocence in the imaginative life both slyly and directly.  Like the hook to a catchy song, this one rekindled in my mind days and weeks after I had first read it. 4.  Daniel Alarcón “Second Lives” “People talk a lot these days about virtual reality, second lives, digital avatars.  It’s a concept I’m fully conversant with, of course.”: the younger son of South American parents compelled to return from Baltimore years before his birth due to an expired visa narrates the story of his older brother’s immersion in America, where old Baltimore friends agree to take the older brother into their Birmingham, Alabama home in the 1980s—and how his now distant family south of the equator struggles with what to communicate to him. Alarcón takes on the human side of heavy socio-political realities with a light hand.  His narrator whose words, at times, seethe with resentment sees in the memory of his older brother a bully whose tactics mirror the dark side of a seductive, all encompassing American mythos: Just before he left, he’d warned me with bared teeth, frightening as only older brothers can be, not to touch a thing.  In case he came back.  If I were to change anything, Francisco said, he’d know. “How?” I asked. “How will you know?” 3.  C.E. Morgan “Twins” (subscription required) Scope is something I admire in fiction, the willingness to address a wider world through the restricted window of a short story, and Morgan’s premise is rich with scope: twins, one light skinned (Mickey) and one dark (Allmon), born of the same black mother, navigate the perils and thrills of childhood while longing for their far off Irish American father. “Twins” opens with the kind of wide-lens portrait of a city (in this case Cincinnati) that's found in the novels of Balzac, but zips in, just as quickly, on the vibrant, vulnerable lives of the characters.  Of Allmon, Morgan writes: “He learned to wait before he knew what waiting was, learned to want before he had the words to want with.” Neither does she eschew the lyrical, a style which perfectly matches the kind of longing her characters harbor: “Look,” his father said again, and [Allmon] looked and all he would remember later was the river like a snake, and barely the city at all—but what a city!  A queen rising on seven hills over her Tiber, forming the circlet of a crown.  A jagged cityscape of steel and brick and glass, with its own bright nightless burn and, beyond it, the fretful, historied amplitude of Kentucky, that netherworld.  This was Cincinnati—the capital of pork, the first truly American city—sprawled before the eyes of two little boys under the momentary aegis of one Mike Shaughnessy… 2.  Chris Adrian “The Warm Fuzzies” More than the others on this list, Adrian’s fiction is funny.  There was no dearth of funny to be found among the “20 under 40” (Gary Shteyngart, Joshua Ferris, Karen Russell, Wells Tower), but Adrian’s funny registered as somehow the most original and otherworldly—even if his protagonist happened to be as recognizable as a teen in a Christian family rock band.  (Or is that not recognizable?) One in a series of black foster siblings, a boy named Paul, or Peabo, takes up the tambourine in the rehearsal garage of the Musical Carter Family of Virginia Beach, Virginia. Within days, middle daughter Molly finds herself involved with the newcomer in an episodic, after hours interpretive dance-off that verges on the inappropriate.  Molly attempts to reconcile the Peabo of daylight with the Peabo of night: There was the boy who had sneaked into her room to offer up the little dance for her interpretation, and then there was the boy who arm-wrestled with Craig and did algebra equations for fun with Colin.  She could understand if there were two boys in him, since she had felt there were two girls in her, one for the regular voice that said regular things about people and one that spoke a language made up only of cruel insults.  If she stared in the bathroom mirror long enough, she thought she could catch that other girl’s features super-imposed in brief flashes upon hers… 1.  Dinaw Mengestu, “An Honest Exit” (from How to Read the Air) The son of an Ethiopian refugee delivers an off-the-cuff account to his privileged students in an Upper West Side classroom of his father’s passage from Ethiopia to a Sudanese port town to Europe, England and America, making free with factual veracity.  The students are enthralled: As I walked home that night I was aware of a growing vortex of e-mails and text messages being passed among my students.  Millions of invisible bits of data were being transmitted through underground cable wires and satellite networks, and I was their sole subject and object of concern.  I don’t know why I found so much comfort in that thought, but it nearly lifted me off the ground, and, suddenly, everywhere, I felt embraced.  As I walked down Riverside Drive, with the Hudson River and the rush of traffic pouring up and down the West Side Highway to my right, the tightly controlled neighborhood borders and divisions hardly mattered. I found Mengestu’s story to be haunting in the way of Krauss, thematically poised in the way of Alarcón, visceral and sweeping in the way of Morgan, and, well, maybe not quite as funny as Adrian.  But it didn’t have it to be.  Echoing real life incident, such as the case of Joseph Ellis, a history professor at Mount Holyoke who claimed to have served in the Vietnam War while teaching it to his students, or, more dubiously, the memoirs of James Frey, Mengestu relays how spinning fact into fiction can bring light to the lives of young minds. Broadly put, The New Yorker appears to favor stories about great divides and mixed identity.  Conveniently, there is something endemic to these boundary lines, their reinforcement or blending or blurring, that literary fiction speaks toward well. So, with mine listed above, I invite you to cite your own favorite short stories from the past year, New Yorker endorsed or no.  Because, of course, there were many worthy others; the New Yorker list just makes for all it was ever meant to be: a starting point.  We can call the one that follows “The Infinite under the Same All Embracing Sky.”
Lists
| 4 books mentioned 3 5 min read
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Essays Notable Articles Sport

The Magisterial Goal

Essays Notable Articles Sport
February 2, 2010 | 4 books mentioned 27 8 min read
The great English broadcaster Ray Hudson once said of the great Argentine footballer Juan Román Riquelme, “Look at him, so languid, look at him walking. He’s like a big, beautiful zombie, Riquelme. He just strolls around…like smoke off a cigarette.” Hudson values hyperbole over precision—or at least succumbs to the former—for he suffers from a sort of fanatic epilepsy when he works. Hudson told me, “When that spotlight’s on you, and you’re calling a game, you’re in the moment, instantaneous, and the selection of words, phrases, and anecdotes are improvised. There’s very little time for actual thought. There’s very little time for reflection on what you’re actually going to say.” And Hudson’s quips, spontaneous and unedited, have gained him a reputation as one of the most notorious announcers in all of sports. Hudson made his career first as a soccer player—for Newcastle United in England, and later for various teams in the defunct North American Soccer League. But he is best known for announcing the modern game for GolTV. Commentary for a soccer match, more so than in any other sport, is like the musical accompaniment to ballet. Therefore as a broadcaster, Hudson is comparable to the conductor of an orchestra playing in the pit beneath a stage of dancers; he adds context and emotion to the drama. No wonder, then, that he often likens footballers to beautiful women. “I’m telling you man,” Hudson once said of FC Barcelona’s seventeen-year-old striker, Bojan Krkic, “this kid could be the best thing on two legs since Sophia Loren.” Unlike most American sports, soccer is a fluid game, with frequent changes of possession and few clear, numeric statistics to evaluate. Soccer is improvisational, whereas American football is regimented. In football, plays are designed then executed, to greater or lesser success. In soccer, players practice formations and then improvise within a spontaneous framework. Therefore soccer, whose action is as constant as light, requires a reactive, jazz-like call. “Most people,” Hudson said, “have no concept of how challenging and demanding it is to call a game. I mean, we’re seeing those pictures the same second you’re seeing them.” There are few numbers to pore over, so the color man’s broadcast, if done well, strives, not to investigate the efficacy of a play, but to transliterate excitement. “When it gets into the red zone,” Hudson said, “when it gets into that area where something truly special might develop, that’s where I come out of the long grass. That’s when it’s showtime for me. And that preparation takes on its own dynamic. If it’s an intoxicating game that has all the ingredients for a beautiful, hot stew, then what are you going to do?” Stylistically, Hudson is a compositor of metaphor. Like the critic and memoirist Anatole Broyard, who describing a lover once wrote, “Her waist was so small, it cut her in two, like a split-personality, or two schools of thought,” Hudson is disinterested in, or even incapable of, inventing basic similes. His description of a goal scored during a meeting of the Mexican and Argentine national sides—“Heinze jumps up like Rudolf Nureyev, beautiful, [and] stabs it home. But it’s Riquelme, man… [His movement is] impossible, like pouring a pint of beer into a shot glass”—suggests, if not a frenetic mind, an uncontainable one. His mouth can’t always keep up with his brain. “It’s not within me,” Hudson said. To be pedestrian with any of my descriptions. I’m just incapable of it. I mean, you hear me now. Once you start me, you cannot stop me.” I asked him to tell me about the most exciting match he ever announced, and he thought immediately of the 38th round of the 2007 La Liga championship (judging by Youtube views, it is also his most famous). Hudson’s announcing is passionate to the point of violence. To give a little context to the game, Hudson was the color analyst, and Phil Schoen the broadcaster, for Real Madrid’s season-ending match at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. The morning of the 17th, Real Madrid was tied at the top of the table with its perennial political and sporting rival, FC Barcelona. Earlier in the season, in their head-to-head match-ups, Madrid had taken four of six points from Barcelona, beating the Catalans at home and drawing away. This meant that if by day’s end both teams were victorious in their matches, Madrid would win the league. Both clubs kicked off simultaneously. By halftime, Barcelona was laying waste to Gimnastic 3-0. Madrid, on the other hand, was trailing 0-1 to Mallorca at home. If the result stood, Barcelona would win the title. But then in the 68th minute Madrid scored, leveling their match. In the 78th they scored again, taking the lead. When Jose Reyes scored two minutes later, he confirmed Madrid’s victory, and with it, the title. “The world was watching,” Hudson remembered, “and you felt something historical was going to happen. Also in that game, there was a good bit of jousting between Phil [Schoen] and me, because the camera kept cutting to these people in the stands, these Hollywood celebrities. I remember in particular for that game Tom Cruise [and Rafael Nadal] were there. And Phil kept going on about Tom Cruise while this gladiatorial fight to the death was happening before us.” As we talked, Hudson’s voice began to rise. “And I got so incensed that I nearly lost it.” Recapping the match live as time ran out, Hudson said of Madrid’s goalkeeper, Iker Casillas, who by his estimation had saved the game, and who had cried in joy after the definitive third goal got scored, “That’s why you see those beautiful tears from a man whose heart is bursting.” The camera, here, cut away to the crowd, where Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were kissing triumphantly in the stands. Perhaps to annoy him, Schoen asked if Hudson’s comment were directed at Cruise. Hudson screamed, “Would you stop talking about tennis players and stupid Hollywood actors, Phil! It’s the gladiators out there, man.” Then, with great disgust, Hudson went on: “Tom Cruise. Give me a break. If he smelled a soccer jockstrap, he’d faint dead away.” Between his playing and commentating days, Hudson has seen countless goals—and many magnificent ones—but one in particular stands out above them, as Real Madrid’s definitive game in June 2007 rises in his mind above the other matches he’s called. Ronaldinho, the Brazilian striker who played his best football in Barcelona, once scored a goal against Villa Real that during the match, along side other hyberboles (“As electrifying as a hairdryer thrown into a hot tub” ) Hudson claimed was tantamount to religious art. Hudson described the goal to me this way. “It was an overhead kick, at an angle, just into the corner of the box, and I called it, if I remember correctly, ‘A Bernini sculpture of a goal, that rivals the Ecstasy of St. Teresa.’ Now, there are probably two people around the United States tuning in who had even heard of Bernini. But for me, it was that good. And in my opinion, instances like that need to be compared to something monumental, to something of an exquisiteness completely unique. And that sculpture came immediately to mind.” He went on: “[During the replays] there was this one wonderful shot of the defender who had been the closest to Ronny, who had just seen this goal, and he was simply stupefied. I described him like Lot’s wife, turning to salt. And then the next second the camera cut away to this little blonde boy in the stands, this little cherub in a Barcelona shirt, and he started smiling. I remember saying, ‘His big bright eyes have just grown the size of saucer plates. He’s never seen anything like this in his life, and he never will again.’” I did not grow up a sports fan. I played soccer and baseball, and later golf, but my father, despite coaching a number of teams I played on, didn’t watch games on TV. By the time I got to college, being a sports fan seemed primitive to me. I fancied myself an artist. Entertainment, I thought, should be a strictly intellectual pursuit, so I watched a lot of emotionally vacant French films, and read a bunch of calamitous, dystopian novels. Back then I thought of Bande á parte and Blood Meridian as the pinnacles of culture. Then in October of 2002, I was staying at my parents’ house. I’d dropped out of college in New York two days before the start of my sophomore year and returned to California. I was drinking too much in Brooklyn, but more significantly, my girlfriend lived in my hometown. Fittingly, though, a month after I got back, she left for school in Irvine. Finding myself alone and acutely depressed one Saturday evening, I turned on the sixth game of the World Series. The Giants, who because of their proximity to my hometown I’d been a nominal fan of as a boy, led the Angels until the seventh. But with one out in that inning, Dusty Baker pulled his starter, Russ Ortiz, who to that point hadn’t allowed a run. The reliever, Félix Rodríguez, promptly gave up a three run homer. In the eighth, the Angel’s third baseman, Troy Glaus, doubled in two more runs. The Giants lost. The next night I watched the seventh game, which was a sort of underwhelming catastrophe. By the third, all the runs that were to get scored had been. The Giants almost rallied in the ninth, getting two men on with only one out. But Kenny Lofton flied out to right-center to end the Series, in favor of the Angels. I broke down in tears. It’s the only time, before or since, that I’ve cried over a game. But that loss, and my illogical reaction to it, proved to me that sport has the capacity to evoke, or at least unlock, genuine emotion. Since then I’ve been a dedicated fan—first of baseball, then of soccer, and finally of mixed martial arts and cycling. As a writer, sports provide for me a finite dramatic stage where a protagonist and an antagonist attempt metaphorically (though in fighting sometimes literally) to kill each other. The plots of the stories, if I’m being reductive, are repetitive. But the distillation of competition, thematic and actual, is the stuff of art. One night in Boston, after the Oakland A’s (I am, again, a geographical fan) got swept by the Detroit Tigers in the 2006 American League Championship Series—a defeat that ruined my mood for the remainder of the playoffs—I felt inspired to write on my wall when I got home from the bar, “If I’m not allowed to care terribly about a game men play, neither should I be affected by anything else man invents.” This is why I like listening to Ray Hudson. He takes sports even more seriously than I do. If, for me, soccer (or baseball or cycling or football) is a representation of human struggle, and is in that sense a means to dissecting and then producing art, for Hudson the game itself is the end—and therefore art itself. “What an absolute scientific goal again,” he once said of a Riquelme masterpiece. “[It’s the great Argentine] who is the Einstein of it…Stand up! Get out of your sofas and applaud if you’re a football fan, because the poets just wrote a sonnet to all of us.” Soccer, for Hudson, is the conflation of science and art, equal parts spontaneity and technique. But when I spoke to him, he was rather dismissive of his role as a broadcaster. “I’ve never had much foresight into what I’m doing. Literally, when the lights go on, I just get out there and tap dance my way through it… I use my very minor knowledge of the English language, and my passion for the game, to accentuate a match.” When everything is said and done, though, the novelist only strives to accentuate the world around him. He observes and he comments. And if that commentary is sufficiently careful and emotional, he commemorates the action permanently.
Essays Notable Articles Sport
| 4 books mentioned 27 8 min read
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41 comments:

  1. I like the article, but it should be titled “12 Gifts to Give Your Female Writer Friend” cause I don’t think my best friend would enjoy lipstick and manicures and bathrobes because he’s a guy. Great ideas for my girl friends though.

  3. What’s weird is that the men I see in my nail shop always come in wearing fabulous looking bathrobes, AND bright pink lipsticks! Just gorgeous.. Although I don’t know if any of them are writers….

  4. I wholeheartedly love this list. I’ve never had a manicure, but I certainly wouldn’t turn one down. And I do need a new bathrobe… (this is painting a really lovely picture of myself. I better stop while I’m ahead.)

    But I also love having a billion little journal and notebooks stashed around. I like that the hardcover ones stand up to my abuse, and while I will use unlined pages, I do like lines better.

    Though feel free to just pass along the booze and coffee. It will never go to waste.

  5. I really wouldn’t want any of these things. Maybe the booze, and that internet blocking thingy, but I don’t need any more booze. When I saw “Gifts that Writers Will Actually Use” I thought I was gonna read about stuff like pens. Or cool paper. Or a cool new app that makes my prose purple. I need a good pen. I’m always looking for a new, good pen. Manicure, not so much. My cuticles are just a mess. And I would rather have the $10 Steinbeck complete works advertised on this page than any crappy best seller. Just saying. This list is more kind of funny in that ironic, I’m-writing-this-cause-I-know-it’s-funny way. And nothing make me more Grinchy than our tired old friend irony.

  6. This is a brlliant list. I’ve just tweeted it as I’m on a deadline for Monday and want my frozen Christmas pressies now!

  7. I LOVE it! My addition to the gifting list is: 4″ heel, Donald Pliner thigh-hign boots. You’ll look fantastic and your feet won’t hurt sitting in a chair. When you need inspiration, just throw those babies up on the desk and let inspiration flow… unless you write children’s books… then it would just be wrong.

  8. I liked this, not because I’d want anything on the list except the yoga class but because it made me feel more apart of something where I thought I was being so utterly abnormal. See the good in negativity you did keep the interest of the readers/writers enough to gain a comment. That in my journal is always a good sign

    Happy Holidays

  9. I never realized how much of a normal writer I was until I read this. I do the exact thing with journals–I buy TONS of them, but can never sully their pages with my mundane words. Also, the nail-biting. I broke the habit of regularly biting my nails many years ago, however when I write a nail always finds its way to my teeth.

    Thank you for this brilliant article.

  10. Brilliant! This is an excellent way to ask your friends and relatives for the gifts you want, Hannah. I’ll have to craft a “12 Gifts That Stevens Will Actually Use” article immediately and see if The Millions or if Stevens Quarterly has room for it before the holidays.

  11. Lame! I love fancy blank books. If they seem too pristine for ordinary musings I use them for dream journals. Yoga classes and handwritten letters are great, but all the rest of these gifts range from sad to insulting in my book. Lipstick and manicures? Really? Here is a news flash: my nails are kept extremely short to help me type faster. Also, I use the Internet for research. If I’m going to be distracted, blocking the Internet isn’t going to help. I’ll be distracted by a book, or by something that needs to be done in the house, or (negating #9) a cat.

    More appropriate gifts for writers: a massage, a wrist brace for carpal tunnel, an ergonomic chair or a stability ball, an ergonomic/split keyboard, better lighting (if this is something their office lacks), editing services, a publishing contract.

  12. What a fun post! Very creative. I especially like the meal idea — while I love to cook, there have been days when I just don’t want to stop writing to figure out what’s for dinner. One of the best “writerly” presents I got was from my sister-in-law, who stuck $20 in a card and said to use it for pizza some night when I didn’t feel like cooking.

    And I’m with Monica on the massage — that’s one of the most awesome presents ever for someone who spends hours hunched in front of a computer.

    Thanks for the entertaining post!

  13. Hmmm…I’m sure many saw the title and thought it would be flasks, scotch, slippers, cigars, shiny black pens, and leather notebooks for some dude who wears sweaters with elbow patches. I admit it. I did.

    I just read a many-part gift guide for hikers, mountaineers, travelers, etc in which all but one part tilted towards men in apparel, and the lonley woman’s section was called “gift guide: snow goddess”. (To give them credit, some items in the non-goddess section came in men’s and women’s versions, but not many). Perhaps it’s a little moment in which we can be honest about the way things are and why lipstick and manicures seemed out of place for us — Hannah didn’t follow the rules. Gift guides that are suppose to be non-gendered (i.e. for writers, geeks, outdoorsy types, urbanites, athletes, etc.) must consist of only items that are man-appropriate, but if any or some items are a little on the feminine side, the list needs to be labeled for women. And includes loads of pink text and photos of shiny things and further indication it is only for women.

    I’m thankful Hannah didn’t represent it for men or women in particular and it wasn’t titled: “12 Holiday Gifts That Writing GODDESSES Will Actually Use”. And I’m thankful that some of you were crankypants about it, because it increased my awareness about my own assumptions.

    It also made me really REALLY want to ask for fancy lipstick for Christmas.

  14. Animals should never, ever, be given as “a gift,” not even if the recipient is actively looking to add one to their life. A decision to care for a living creature is serious business and should be left up to the person taking on that responsibility. If you give your friend a book she doesn’t like, she can exchange it or give it away; it’s not quite that easy if you give her a cat or dog. Animals are not “one size fits all,” and, sadly, shelters are full of unwanted pets thoughtlessly given as gifts.

  15. There is a typo in this article, which is kind of ironic, since it bears advice for writers and those who love them.

    (In case you hadn’t spotted it: “Although she loves the look of journal, she never writes in it.”)

  16. I love fancy blank books too. I have a hard time writing in them – except when I buy a fancy journal to record my daily diabetes stuff. Then I feel I deserve them because they record the crappy side of my life.

    I’m always happy to receive books, gift cards from a book store, and gift cards big enough for two for dinner.

    Flowers. I love flowers. I love flowers any time. I don’t need an occasion. They just make me happy.

  18. I have trouble writing in fancy journals at first. I usually have to carry them around for awhile and get used to them. But once you take the plunge and starting writing your thoughts down (no matter how trivial), there is no turning back. Once you finish with them they preserve much better than spiral notebooks, and they look way more cool on your bookshelf.

  19. Love it. I want all of these things. Except for a pet. I have too many. (And they do nothing for my concentration. I guess I’m petting them wrong.)

  21. …and if you can’t write ’em a letter, buy em a subscription to a zine, some of which are reliably quarterly and arrive in greeting card sized envelopes!

    Also…I had a moment thinking that a 14 year old of my acquaintance was a published author until I remembered he spells his Lewis Louis.

  22. Pingback: (More) Gifts for Writers | I Should Be Writing

  24. Any writer worth the ink in their pen would end your lovely friendship via text! These gifts might be delightful for a high-schooler who just won an inter-school short story contest but for the rest of us who contemplate our raison d’etre hourly, save your money! Here’s why…

    ‎1. A Cheesy New Bestseller: Only if you’re trying to remind us of how mediocre we already feel. The lone exception might be Jacqueline Susann’s ‘Valley Of The Dolls.’
    2. Good Lipstick: Only if you’re buying it for Thomas Pynchon or Julian Barnes. In which case, call me I’d like to be there for the unwrapping.
    3. Foreign Language Learning Software: I can barely master the English language nevermind trying to say ‘verisimilitude’ in French or Swahili.
    4. A Bathrobe: Contrary to popular belief, Michael Douglas PLAYING a writer in The Wonder Boys gave us all a bad rap.
    5. A Manicure: That’s right up there with ‘Dress to Impress’.
    6. Internet Blocking Software: Take away the internet and prescriptions for Zoloft will skyrocket. Don’t let the drug companies win!
    7. Booze, Coffee & Stimulants: Wrapping and putting a bow on it would just be hypocritical.
    8. Yoga Classes: Pain and suffering are all we have left.
    9. A Pet: Fine. But if there’s only one beer left in the fridge, I’m not sharing!
    10. Freezable Homemade Foods: We’re writers not handicaps or invalids.
    11. A Hand-written Letter: If you promise to write in the voice of a suicidal narrator from 1874, feel free!
    12. A Copy Of ‘The Gift’ By Lewis Hyde: I have 7 copies all of which I’ve never read so you tell me.

  25. Pamela August Russell would benefit from having all these gifts, especially reading her 7 copies of The Gift.

  26. Even if it’s true I wouldn’t use it, I’d rather get the blank journal.
    These maybe are perfect gifts for some specific writer – that’s to say the author of the article.

  27. I was given a blank journal for my birthday back in HS. My then boyfriend gave it to me and wrote “for your first masterpiece.” The pressure in that phrase kept the book blank for many, many years. Finally I started putting clever clips and quips in it. I still get blank journals and I buy them for friends, but I’d rather not get them.

    The rest of the list is delightful and inspired.

    Michelle

  28. Pingback: Friday Links | Nadria Tucker

  29. LOVE this list! I already posted it on my Facebook account with specifications regarding lipstick (Bobbi Brown of course.) And although I wholeheartedly agree with #7, “Booze, Coffee, and other stimulants” I feel strongly that pills should also be included (had to add that to my Facebook post.)

    And considering that I’ve had on the exact same outfit since Sunday #4 (bathrobe) also struck a chord with me.

    Brilliant list! And to the person who said this list wouldn’t apply to guys, that’s because I imagine their list would be quite short (booze & women.)

  30. Pingback: PEN.org » Blog Archive More Peace - PEN.org
  31. Pingback: Links for the Weekend « Writing and Rambling
  32. Pingback: Links: Time theft. « La Linterna del Monstro

  33. Wow. I really liked how this list showed a real sense of how gifts should be chosen with the giver in mind. And the comments are all, but I wouldn’t like that! Nobody’s getting all ten, OK! And Hannah seems to have the pay attention to what people actually like and use down.

    But to add, manicures are good for short, natural nails people, you just have to find a place that understands natural nails and does no polish manicures. It’s good to go just to see how a professional does things. Manicures are great as pick me ups, horrible as a weekly expense and time sink. My gift for natural nail pals is OPI’s Nail Envy in Matte. It’s a clear non-shiny nail strengthener. Nails get stronger, but you don’t look like you’re wearing polish. Works for men, too.

  34. I just got around to reading this and I love it. There are some grinchy so-and-sos on this comment thread, which is also kind of delightful. Hopefully someone turns those frowns upside down with a festive new stability ball.

  35. i bought “the gift” as a gift to myself. it’s fabulous!
    great list, i especially need a manicure…i bite my cuticles when concentrating. Also, a bathrobe would be perfect. you should see how i write. oy vey.

  36. I think it’s a good list, but as I’ve been sitting in front of the computer writing all day, I think I’d add “massage” to the list to make it complete, and maybe “ergonomically sound chair” and “chiropractor gift certificate” (do they have that sort of thing?).

    Thank you so much for “freedom” and “anti-social”, of which I was unaware until I read this. I’m not waiting for someone to give me these–I’m getting them, now, in the hope I might save myself.

    Hope you get everything on your list, and then some.

  37. Pingback: Gifts for Writers | Blog, by Shannon
  38. Pingback: Gifts for Writers « LB Writes

  39. For everyone complaining that the list didn’t have pens, cool paper, etc. Let me go on record as saying–DO NOT buy a writer pens or notebooks. Ever. I am so picky about my pens and notebooks, it just takes up space. I won’t use the cool pens or the nice notebooks if they aren’t “right”. Just like you shouldn’t buy a carpenter a new hammer because it “looks nice”, don’t buy me pens or notebooks. PLEASE.

    I think it’s a nice list. Yes, some of the items are women-centric, but things like yoga are for dudes, too. Especially if those dudes have back pain. Bathrobes are definitely for dudes…my husband wears his bathrobe a hell of a lot more than I wear mine.

  41. Pingback: Allyson Latta | 16 Links for the Writer and Book Lover This Christmas

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Notable Articles Screening Room

“Why So Serious?” Batman and the Intellectuals

Notable Articles Screening Room
August 12, 2008 | 4 books mentioned 8 7 min read
Reading Nikil Saval (my Stanford friend and colleague)'s review of The Dark Knight at n+1 today, I found myself of two minds about his take. I too had exclaimed angrily about the impossible bustiness of the whole troupe of Russian ballerinas Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) kidnaps on his yacht, and the befuddling reappearance of Cillian Murphy (villain psychiatrist from Batman Begins), as well as the almost unwatchable chaos that was most of the action scenes, and the manipulative gotcha "black criminals are human too!" scene. I had exclaimed about other things Nikil hadn't mentioned - like why bother getting the wonderful Maggie Gyllenhaal to play just another insipid damsel in distress (albeit, weakly disguised as a "strong, independent woman": she's a DA! and she kicks the Joker in the balls while wearing an evening dress!)But the meat of Nikil's review was his reading of the Dark Knight's plot as political allegory. I am a rather bad reader of allegorical plots and having been told in vague terms by many people that the political implications of this Batman were intense, I hoped my symbolic reading skills were up to the task. My reading of the plot as allegory went something like this: our country has been taken over by a demented clown who burns money and oil and whose motives are incomprehensible. As you can imagine, I was very disappointed reading thus - I thought that this was not a very useful or provocative take on the current state of the union. I had also been told that Batman "goes over to the dark side" in this movie, but as far as I could see, except for wearing the black he always had, he was still the good guy (we knew his motives remained pure). Never, not once, did he seem taken in by the thrilling chaos that the Joker was peddling. (I had had a vague image of Batman and the Joker a la Danny Aiello and Bruce Willis in the under-appreciated Hudson Hawk synchronizing a heist by both singing "Swinging on a Star" in the same tempo. Holding hands while causing mayhem together! What fun! Try pulling that plot off next time, Christopher Nolan!) Again, I was disappointed.As Nikil's review will show you, I missed rather a lot. The crux of the allegory and the moral ambiguity lies in Batman's recourse to criminal methods to get the job of crime fighting done: his creation of a god-like surveillance system that violates the privacy of every resident of Gotham to find the Joker, and his beating information out of the Joker about the location of hostages and ticking bombs. In this, we can see the spectral reenactment of our own political situation: The US, which imagines itself as the world's superhero, the champion of good, betraying its ideals (civil rights, the sovereignty of law, peace, justice) to defend these same ideals. Here was the genuine ambiguity and the interesting symbolic plot I had missed. As Nikil puts it "to fight anarchy is to lose one's bearings, and move one's own soul dangerously close to evil." And this anarchy, of course, is terrorism and terrorists embodied in the Joker.No matter what you might, in the end, think of Batman's (or the United States') ultimate moral affiliation after these adventures, Nikil's plot reading holds. My being of two minds takes issue more with Nikil's idea that The Dark Knight is somehow a propaganda classroom, manufacturing citizenly consent for US policy and reinforcing in even its youngest viewers "every conceit that this childishly self-regarding nation has about its mission in the world":And so the Joker, like other criminals in the film, is treated by Batman the way America treats terrorists: he is tortured. Intellectuals who favor the use of torture in the United States often reduce the ethical question to a hypothetical "ticking bomb" scenario, in which a terrorist reveals he has a plot to blow up thousands of people in one hour, and the only way for officials to extract information from the lunatic in time is through ruthless physical violence. "Ethics 101," Charles Krauthammer calls it. "Hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty." It doesn't matter that, in a real Ethics 101 class, one would learn that legal ethics is not reducible to a childish theoretical picture; that there is not a shred of historical or present evidence on which to base such hypotheticals. (There are bombs in the real world, but they never tick.) Yet the real-world debate over torture is frequently reduced to this argument, because it has a terrifying simplicity to it. As in the scenario itself, the argument doesn't even give you time to think: you are simply asked to decide, and your decision then becomes actual policy. When it is presented in something like real time, as it is in The Dark Knight, it actually functions as "Ethics 101" for the children who see the film.And I take issue with this not only because, dunderhead that I am, the only childishly self-regarding conceit I came away from the movie with on my own was "our president is a psychopathic jester who is burning down our economy and must be stopped at any cost - damn the law." No, I take issue with this because it means that there is no difference between art and life - that the moral and social rules and actions we observe and tolerate in comic books and novels foist themselves upon us as we read and work their way into our real lives. Saying that children who watch Batman are being primed to condone their country's use of torture is like saying that reading Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels will make us kill our rich friends and assume their identities - or, at least, that we'll approve of those who do.This just gets what movie-going and novel-reading is about all wrong. I think most people go to the movies for escape - we get out of our own heads, away from our own worries, we suspend the real world for a while to move into a variety of different, often joyfully impossible, worlds. Here we find respite from our own lives. I also think the rules of genre are comforting. Real life-plots are unpredictable: We never know in real life when we're walking into a chapter of personal tragedy, when things might take a romantic turn, when they'll go Beckett-y or Kafkaesque, but if I rent, say, 27 Dresses or The Holiday, I have the comfort of knowing how it will go, even though I have the pleasure of not knowing quite how it will go. It's soothing. And I don't, unless I'm Don Quixote, get up from either movie and expect life to yield up to me the personalities or plots I just watched. Just as I don't get up from Batman thinking that I wouldn't mind seeing more terrorists water-boarded, even if, obedient student of the comic book genre that I am, I accepted whatever "the good guy" had to do to get the job done as "good" - which is probably why I missed identifying Batman's "criminal activities" as such ("Yeah, but it's Batman who's spying on everyone. Now if the Joker, it'd be another story").Admittedly, this is part of a larger resentment and even anger I harbor against intellectuals at the movies - and indeed part of my somewhat perverse occasional campaign against taste and connoisseurship generally. Should Batman induce such anguish and demand such moral seriousness at it does at n+1? ("Why so serious?" as the Joker puts it.)Although I agree with much of Nikil's reading, I find in it something repellent (morbid, paranoid, despair-inducing) that I associate with the Leftist intellectual temperament. I have written before about Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, Reflections on a Damaged Life and it is from Minima Moralia that I find the purest expression of this attitude that troubles and repels me:There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent "How lovely!" becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better... The malignant deeper meaning of ease, once confined to the toasts of conviviality, has long since spread to more appealing impulses... Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.Adorno's book is a long collection of fragmentary meditations in the same inconsolable tone as this one. And while I have moments of deep sympathy for his tragic worldview, his sense that everything in our world is broken and sinister and corrupting, I think, for myself, that to linger in this mindset for long would be devastating. I would kill myself. I continue to marvel that the anguished consciousness on display here managed to survive itself for 250 pages. There is something of Adorno in Nikil's take on the Dark Night - that watching this movie - maybe movies generally? - can be dangerous and morally suspect: That we Americans are watching our crappy, multi-million dollar nation-affirming movies while the world we set on fire burns. We retreat into movies (becoming ever easier in this era of Netflix, iTunes, and pay-per-view), neglect the world, and become dumber for our retreats into escapism, thus less capable of fixing the world we fled in the first place. "History will record," Nikil writes, "that, while a monumental catastrophe overtook the world financial markets and a new colonialism destroyed the lives of nations, the United States still found time and money to resolve in its films what it could not, for the life of it, perform in the world."Maybe History will. And maybe my logic is disgraceful and maybe I am deluded - or just weak (a junkie). The number of head pats, cheek pinches, and chin chucks I continue to get even now that I am almost 30 suggests that intellectual seriousness continues to elude me: but I love movies. And I defend them. They allow me to go into worlds that are more beautiful and make more sense than ours. Going to the movies, reading novels, is a kind of idealism for me, a longing for order and beauty that I will never find in this world. Maybe this isn't morally justifiable, but it's psychically necessary. Even Batman, flawed as it was, gave me a much needed respite from myself.Is Batman the problem? Is Batman a bigger problem than is an impenetrable seriousness, than a relentless critical certainty that would seem sometimes to insist that despair is the moral highground?
Notable Articles Screening Room
| 4 books mentioned 8 7 min read
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Best of the Millennium Notable Articles

Best of the Millennium, Pros Versus Readers

Best of the Millennium Notable Articles
September 25, 2009 | 4 books mentioned 85 3 min read
One thing I know after working on The Millions for all these years is that the site has some incredibly knowledgeable and avid readers, the sort of book people I loved working with back in my bookstore days and who are the lifeblood of literary culture. And so, even as we were polling our distinguished panel of writers, editors, and critics, we wondered, what do Millions readers think? We polled The Millions Facebook group to find out. The list our readers came up with was very interesting, and deviated in noticeable ways from that of the Pros. Before I get into the details. Have a look at the two lists below (Links in our panel list go to the writeups we published throughout the week.  Links in our reader list go to Amazon): Panel Readers 1 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen 1 The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz 2 The Known World by Edward P. Jones 2 2666 by Roberto Bolaño 3 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell 3 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides 4 2666 by Roberto Bolaño 4 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell 5 Pastoralia by George Saunders 5 The Road by Cormac McCarthy 6 The Road by Cormac McCarthy 6 Atonement by Ian McEwan 7 Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald 7 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon 8 Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson 8 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen 9 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro 9 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson 10 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 10 White Teeth by Zadie Smith 11 The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz 11 Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami 12 Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg 12 The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini 13 Mortals by Norman Rush 13 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 14 Atonement by Ian McEwan 14 Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald 15 Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis 15 Empire Falls by Richard Russo 16 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides 16 Runaway by Alice Munro 17 The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem 17 The Master by Colm Tóibín 18 Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link 18 Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 19 American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman 19 Unaccustomed Earth ** by Jhumpa Lahiri 20 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson 20 Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke      While everyone seems to agree that The Corrections is a great book (it was the panel winner by a landslide), Millions readers put seven books ahead of it, and anointed Oscar Wao the top book of the decade.  Our readers have always loved Oscar, so that wasn't a huge surprise, but it was also interesting to see that the readers had a high opinion of  Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, rectifying probably the biggest snub on our panel list, (along with White Teeth).  But then, the readers snubbed The Known World, so who knows. With a massive field of potential books, snubs were inevitable. Left off both lists were both of Jonathan Safran Foer's novels, David Foster Wallace's Oblivion (his only fiction of the decade), and Denis Johnson's much praised Tree of Smoke. Voters were also dying to include Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. It was ineligible because it was published in Spanish in 1998, but it makes one wonder, what books will seem like shoo-ins for this type of exercise 10 or 11 years from now but are completely under the radar (or still untranslated) today? Moving back to the books that did make the list, I also loved that the readers included Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, a book that I've been hearing about from our readers for years, and Half of a Yellow Sun, a book that's always had a lot of support in the online literary community.  Also intriguing is the appearance of mega-best seller The Kite Runner. Finally, if we try to look for a consensus among the two lists, several titles appear on both, but the two with the most support across the entire spectrum of respondents are 2666 and Cloud Atlas, which, if you had to pick just two books to define the literary decade now coming to an end, would make for very interesting selections indeed. We'll be publishing follow-up pieces in our Millennium series over the coming weeks, so look for those. I also wanted to thank our panel and Millions readers for taking the time to participate in the series. If you enjoyed the series and value the coverage that The Millions provides, please consider supporting the site.
Best of the Millennium Notable Articles
| 4 books mentioned 85 3 min read
Lists

The Amazon Alphabet: From Audio Books to Zoo

Lists
September 24, 2012 | 4 books mentioned 4 2 min read
You've probably noticed that Amazon, like many sites, employs an "auto-complete" feature on its search box. When you start typing in letters, it suggests things that begin with those letters. It's probably safe to assume that it suggests the most frequently searched words, so, if we look at Amazon's book section we can type in letters and discover, for each letter of the alphabet, the most popular searches on Amazon. Last time we did this, about a year and half ago, the results were fairly literary and 18 months before that, vampires reigned. This time around, Fifty Shades has ushered in an era of erotic-inflected popular fiction, and diet books and YA lit figure prominently as well. You might consider this exercise, the ABCs of Amazon, to be a peek into the reading habits of America and, like it or not, a primer for what's popular in the world of books: Audio Books Bared to You (erotic fiction by Sylvia Day) Cloud Atlas (by David Mitchell thanks to the upcoming feature film) Diary of a Wimpy Kid (the very popular children's series by Jeff Kinney) Eat to Live (a diet book) Fifty Shades of Grey (The erotica that launched a publishing trend) Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn's blockbuster) Hunger Games (Replacing "Harry Potter" as the top "H" search in YA lit) ISBN number search (funny because ISBNs work in the search box) James Patterson Kindle (no surprise here) Lee Child Michael Connelly No Easy Day (The book about the bin Laden raid) Organic Chemistry (A textbook search) Psychology (More textbooks) Quiet (a book about introverts by Susan Cain) Rick Riordan Stephen King The Hunger Games Unbroken (by Laura Hillenbrand) Vince Flynn Wheat Belly (a diet book) X-Men Yoga Zoo by James Patterson (Amazon has been known to personalize and regularly adjust its results, so your Amazon alphabet may vary.)
Lists
| 4 books mentioned 4 2 min read