It’s that time of year again. You start with a list of
people and you try to come up with an imaginative gift for each; something that
they’ll really cherish and enjoy rather than stick in the back of the cupboard
or worse put straight onto Ebay on Christmas afternoon.
And yet books are so old fashioned, aren’t they? How can books possibly compete with the sexiness
of a games console or some other representative of the consumer tech explosion;
how, in this day and age, can a book be a gift that somebody will be genuinely happy
to receive?
It’s simple. Few other gifts have such a breadth of subjects
and genres that enable you to match them so precisely to the person you are
buying for, especially when you can look across everything from fiction to
non-fiction, biography and autobiography, instructive and even self-help. It is
the gift that says more than any other that you have really thought about the
person you are buying for and have matched their personalities and interest to
the gift you have bought.
Books can fire the imagination like little else. They are
the gift that can transport you away from your everyday woes and into a world where
anything is possible; a gift that can be so life-affirming that they can make
you feel better about yourself and those around you; a gift that can challenge
or inspire, entertain or inform, and in the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, do all sorts of other things for you as well.
But a book is also the gift that can bind you to the
recipient. Years from now, the message you leave inside the cover will inspire
memories of your relationship, perhaps even after you have gone. It is a gift
that you may read only once or many times. But few of us could bring ourselves
to discard a book given to us with thought and care by somebody whose
friendship and love we value. And those of us that write would give anything to
know that the words we commit to paper have contributed to any of this for just
one person.
So whatever is your genre of choice – whether it’s Jamie’s
15 Minute Meals, Rod Stewart’s autobiography or groundbreaking literature like
Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies – the pleasure you will be giving will be
far less transient than many other gifts options that may have strayed onto
your list.
The other point, of course, is they’re the easiest thing in
the world to wrap!
