Charm-o-Matic

Dreaming in a new language and dating a transcendent entity: A couple of memoirs for the non-fiction fans on your gift list.

Pretty covers, smart pages.

The general consensus on this year’s best books lists suggests that Lit by Mary Karr is a stand-out memoir, so that one’s going on my personal wish list for the holidays. Two other memoirs of note this year, Dreaming in Hindi and Dating Jesus are also worthy gifts to give.

In Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language, former magazine editor Katherine Russell Rich travels to India after overcoming cancer and then settles into the northwestern part of the country for a year to learn Hindi. She chronicles her experiences – first verbally stumbling at every turn and eventually making jokes and even dreaming in her new language – with a subtle humor and a poetic spirit. Rich also became an expert along the way in linguistics and neuroscience, and she skillfully weaves the latest research about how adults learn second languages into the narrative.

That book won't carry itself.

Rich describes the experiential shock that goes along with the words she’s learning – and the ones she’s missing. “Privacy,” for example, is nonexistent, both in Hindi and in her everyday experience of living in Udaipur. She writes about how geography shapes the psyche as well, and how her senses themselves began to change: “My skin continues to absorb the smell of heat. My ears fill with color…”

Later, she mentions to a linguist, “It was as if in Hindi, I became a different person.” Rich analyzes the research about how language affects thought, but in the end, she’s all about the poetry.

For an extra flourish, pair the book with an exotic-looking fair-trade bag from Ten Thousand Villages.

Another memoir that combines endearing humor and impressive scholarship, Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl preaches the gospel of independence. Journalist Susan Campbell writes thoughtfully about her church-heavy girlhood in Missouri. An irrepressible tomboy, Campbell asked questions sitting in her pew from the start and seemed to always know something wasn’t quite right when she was told that women were expected to remain silent in church. Although she didn’t stick with church, her questions eventually led her to seminary, and she merges her story with the work of philosophers, historians and feminist theologians.

“Fundamentalism broke off in us, didn’t it?” Campbell’s brother once asks her as they attend a church service together as adults. She agrees – it broke off in her like a sword, she muses, and much of Dating Jesus is about Campbell healing that wound.

Balm, not of Gilead.

Recalling her early years, Campbell writes about witnessing door-to-door, playing baseball, taking her fashion cues from The Brady Bunch and singing hymns in four-part harmony. She writes about loving seminary classes many years later, especially when one of her professors says that many of the early Biblical texts subvert the hierarchy. And yes, she writes about dating (and not dating) and dancing (and not dancing) and loving the real Jesus – the egalitarian one – despite what religion has to say about him.

For a little extra flourish, pair the book with a tube of Looking Good for Jesus lip balm and get more “subvert the hierarchy” bang for your buck.

Dreaming in Hindi, $17.16
Hindi-inspired bag, prices vary
Dating Jesus, $10.80
Jesus-inspired lip balm, $5.99

Pretty, cloth-covered books to gaze at, give away and even read.

Delightfully bookish.

As one of my most discriminating and zeitgeist-attuned readers, you’ve probably seen or read about these new Penguin editions of several classics somewhere by now. Nonetheless, I put them before you here and suggest that they’re a most suitable answer to many a gift-giving situation. Why the commotion? Sure, they’re beautiful. And sure, they’re classics: Mr. Willoughby and Miss Havisham and social conventions and moral dilemmas and all that. But I admire the books for a couple of other reasons as well.

1. The designer, Coralie Bickford-Smith, took the book’s themes into account when she created the covers. As she explained on Design*Sponge, “The peacock feather on Dorian Grey, for example, plays on the book’s themes of vanity and the superficial, whereas the leaf motif on Jane Eyre refers directly to the lightning-blasted chestnut tree, a concrete element in the text that serves as a potent symbol of the book’s central relationship.” Smart and pretty – we like that.

2. The pages feel as sumptuous as the covers look. You know how the pages on some classics feel cheap or sometimes a little gritty? Not so here. The pages are smooth and heavy and thick with importance.

So in this case, judge the book and the cover and the personality of those on your gift list all at once.

Classic books, $13.60 on Amazon

A new illustrated collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry is presumably for kids but would feather anyone’s bookshelf.

Isabelle Arsenault's Emily

Hope’s all the rage these days after our recent election, but Emily Dickinson got there first. One of our greatest poets, Dickinson’s reputation as America’s favorite quirky hermit sometimes overshadows her genius. This new collection, My Letter to the World and Other Poems, presents a few of her rightfully well-known poems with drop-dead gorgeous illustrations by Isabelle Arsenault.

While hope (that “thing with feathers”) is perched on Dickinson’s shoulder in the cover illustration, many of the poems she wrote describing her feelings toward death and isolation are featured in this collection as well, which is part of a series that pairs classic poems with contemporary illustrations. Arsenault’s paintings complement the poetry beautifully, and it’s hard to avoid words like “haunting” and “dreamy” when describing them.

So yes, the illustrations are haunting and dreamy, but they also contain a good bit of whimsy (you have to peer through the death imagery to get it, which is just as Dickinson would have liked it).

Taking a Dickinson seminar in grad school, I discovered that her initial poems were prettied up a bit by her first editor. It was nice of him to publish her and all (which isn’t quite how they say things in grad school), but by trying to make her what he deemed presentable, he put her work in packages that she didn’t really intend. Paired with these illustrations, the poems have another context entirely.

In fact, some of her verses seem even more riddle-like in this presentation. Illustrations that accompany one of the poems recast Dickinson in her trademark white dress as more of a tumbling teacup:  “I cannot live with You — / It would be Life — / And Life is over there — / Behind the Shelf.”

One of my favorites opens the book: “There’s a certain slant of light, / On winter afternoons – / That oppresses, like the heft / Of cathedral tunes.” The first time I read that poem as a child, I was astounded that someone understood my hidden melancholy. So even though the aforementioned “haunting”-ness may not make this book the very merriest of holiday gifts, the hope is there, too – and the smart kid on your list will appreciate the nuance.

My Letter to the World and Other Poems, (Visions in Poetry), $9.95