Books For Your Stockings...

For... Kids of All Ages
The Tales of Beedle the Bard, by JK Rowling

The Tales of Beedle the Bard was a plot device in the last Harry Potter book, but JK Rowling has expanded it into a complete book in its own right. It’s a book destined to be enjoyed by children everywhere, and destined to be secretly enjoyed by their parents. You may be wondering if Rowling needs to write a Harry Potter spin-off at this point, but rest assured she’s not cashing in – the proceeds of this book will go to charity. Those proceeds may be considerable, because when the one and only preview copy was auctioned, it fetched £1.95 million, again for charity. The version being made available to the public will be a much more affordable £6.99. It’s a shortish book, at about 130 pages, and it contains 5 fairytale-like stories that, in the context of the Harry Potter series, wizards and witches have read whilst growing up. It’s not really another Harry Potter book, but it will almost certainly sell just as well. It’s actually a significant departure for Rowling to go from increasingly large books to short stories. But if there’s any Christmas book that you can practically guarantee will please its target audience, you’d have to say it’s this one.

Release date: Dec 6. Published by Bloomsbury, cover price £6.99.

For... Awkward Customers
Just What I Always Wanted! by Robin Laurance

Everyone knows someone who claims they don’t want anything for Christmas. Those friends or relatives who are awkward to buy for, but who would never be grateful if you didn’t buy them anything. So get them Just What I Always Wanted! this year, and tell them to do their research for next Christmas with it. This is a book about the birthday presents that the rich and famous have given each other, or simply odd presents that have been given arranged with one entry for every day of the year. You might not wish to give anyone Gold, Frankincense or Myrrh, but something like a diary, like Anne Frank got for her 13th Birthday, might be the start of something. Actually, this book is more of a humorous read than a present-giver’s manual though. You would be unlikely to have a $11 million marble mansion made for anyone, as tycoon William Vanderbilt did for his wife, or a DVD of all your movies, as Tom Cruise did for his. Still, if someone is infuriating you with their inability to suggest any present whatsoever, then this is a good present to give to show them how you feel about their indecision.

Out now. Published by Quercus, cover price £9.99.

For... Budding Geniuses
Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell’s previous two books, Blink and The Tipping Point, showed how adept he is at illustrating complicated theories about our modern world with simple anecdotes. His new book, Outliers, looks at what makes people successful. Now, we’re not talking ‘get a promotion’ success here. We’re talking about what makes people successful in their fields at a level approaching genius. Gladwell’s theory is that perspiration is far more important than inspiration – in fact, working harder than others is about the only important factor. His theory is that the truly successful, from Bill Gates to The Beatles, put in hours of work at a young age, which makes their skill level head and shoulders above everybody else’s. The magic number he arrives at is 10,000 hours – which would take people with a moderate amount of time on their hands about 10 years to achieve. You’ll need to read the book to see how he arrives at these figures, and also how he analyses why Asians in America seem to do better at Maths, and why “demographic luck” suggests that people born in the 1830s or 1930s had a better chance of becoming millionaires. Know anyone who is shooting for the moon? Get ‘em this book.

Out now. Published by Allen Lane, cover price £16.99

For... Poetry Lovers
Stickboy, by Shane Koyczan.

A book for poetry fans? Well, we at The Skinny would be remiss in our duties if we failed to suggest Stickboy by Shane Koyczan, the Canadian performance poet who sold out his Skinny-supported event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Koyczan’s story here is autobiographical, about a boy who is bullied, and gradually ends up turning into a bully himself. Now, Koyczan may be a performance poet, but his words can perform just as well on the page without his assistance. And that’s the case here, where Koyczan’s free-verse type of poetry is adaptable to suit his subject, or the actions described on the page. Some people find poetry hard to read – but this is not that type. Here you’ll find free-flowing words that hasten, not hinder, the pace of your reading. If you do want this book – and I recommend it highly – it’s best to order it online, because it had a low print run, and copies ran out fast. Someone clearly underestimated how popular poetry like this could be, and that’s a shame. But as any of you who saw Koyczan live, or any of you who’ve seen clips of him on the net will know, he’s extremely entertaining, and there’s ample evidence of that here.

Out now. Published by House of Parlance, cover price £7.99.

For... Avid Readers
A Mercy, By Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize winning author of Beloved, takes her time writing books – her last came out in 2003, and she’s written 9 books in total over 38 years or so. It should be mentioned that they’re usually worth the wait. A Mercy is the first time Morrison has written about slavery since Beloved, this time setting her book in the late 17th Century when the slave trade was beginning. The story is grounded with a strong central relationship, that of a 16 year old slave girl, Florens, with her absent but remembered mother, who allowed Florens to be used as collateral to settle a debt between slaveowners. The central question of the book is whether this act was the Mercy of the title, or whether it should be understood in different terms. It’s a powerful story, and it’s told in language that has a simple clarity that nonetheless cleverly expresses a complicated jumble of emotions. Morrison uses a series of monologues to build up a picture of Florens’ life, and it culminates, almost inevitably, with a monologue by her mother which forms an extremely well-judged climax to the novel. The sort of book you should give to the bookworm who’s looking for a memorable read.

Out now. Published by Chatto and Windus, cover price £15.99.

For... Very Avid Readers
The Paris Review Interviews Vol 3, by Various.

The Paris Review Interviews are close to legendary for having featured almost every leading author they could get their hands on. The exception was Thomas Mann, who died whilst the interviewer was ringing the doorbell (if you believe their story, that is, and I choose to). The interviews simply get various authors to explain their writing processes. The interviewers generally ask short questions, and let the authors get on with telling us how they go about their craft. This third volume of collected interviews is notable for its variety, featuring everyone from Evelyn Waugh to Salman Rushdie. There’s Harold Pinter, famous for the use of pauses in his work, and Georges Simenon, famous for barely pausing whilst he worked, able as he was to write 60-80 pages per day! That the subjects are all fascinating about their own work is a credit to the Paris Review’s practice of just letting them talk. Writers who can sometimes come off as over-defensive or arrogant seem human here, discussing the subject that, it seems they love the most. Martin Amis, for example, is downright amiable. So this is maybe the book to give the aspiring scribe you know, just to show him or her how it’s done by the experts.

Out now. Published by Canongate, cover price £14.99.

For... English Students
The Shakespeare Handbook, by R.W. Maslen and Michael Schmidt.

Know anyone who’s going to be studying Shakespeare? Get them this handy guide quickly then, before someone teaches them the plays in a way that sucks all the fun out of them. The Shakespeare Handbook presents a digested complete works, taking the most famous scenes from each play and adding text to explain some of the more obscure phrases used, the ones that have been lost to time. The book arranges the plays chronologically, with a short piece of writing introducing each one, and this approach gradually builds up a picture of the themes and motifs that Shakespeare used, and how they evolved over his career. The analysis of the plays comes across as learned without being over-complicated, and the theories about the plays that are advanced here are surprisingly entertaining – I’d point to the piece describing Titus Andronicus as Shakespeare’s revenge on his Latin teachers as an example of this. It’s a well put-together book, laid out well and with high quality photographs throughout complementing the text. And though this may not be the complete works – the edition I’d recommend there is the Norton Critical edition – it’s a worthy companion to them, and a nice gift item for anyone with even a spark of enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s plays.

Out now. Published by Quercus, cover price £15.00.

And For... Maths Students (Hear me out!)
Everything and More, by David Foster Wallace.

This is not a new book, but it’s a good one. It comes to mind because Foster Wallace, an extremely talented writer with a style all his own, committed suicide after a long period of depression earlier this year. Foster Wallace was best known for Infinite Jest, a massive work of fiction that was hard work, but worth the effort. Everything and More is similarly hard work: it’s non fiction, and about the concept of Infinity in Mathematics. Foster Wallace looks at how, while the laws of Mathematics may suggest that there is an infinity, seeing a horse and any horned animal suggests a unicorn – it may exist, but where is it to be found? Foster Wallace shows us how mathematicians have gone about trying to prove that it is more than just a concept – and poignantly makes mention early on of three great mathematicians, Cantor, Gödel and Boltzmann, who all suffered mental illness, the latter having taken his own life. It’s poignant in retrospect, but this is far from a sad read - Foster Wallace shows that maths is not the cold discipline it’s often stereotyped as in what is, very surprisingly, a funny book. And you’ll have to read it to see how he pulls it off...

Out now. Published by Phoenix Popular Science, cover price £8.99.