The Gift of Reading

Books are terrible gifts.

This is hard for me to write, as one who loves reading books, but the truth must be told.

It's very unlikely that the recipient will enjoy the gift. At any time, you can choose to read any one of a million or so books. How many of those million books would you enjoy? I'm guessing very few.  If instead I chose your next book, would your chances of enjoying your next book increase or decrease? Even if I had superior taste and discernment, and was familiar with your reading preferences, I'll bet you'd be happier, on average, with the books you selected yourself.

No one has time for sub-optimal books. We can only read a finite number of books over our lives, and for those of us who love books, our finite number of lifetime books is much too finite. For every gift book we read, we must discard a book we really wanted to read. That's a bad bet to make with our limited reading capital, a bet whose losing consequences are almost too painful for me to contemplate.

You might think getting a free book is worth something, but it's not. The giver pays the cover price but the recipient must invest a substantial amount of time actually reading the book. That investment of time is, for most of us, far more dear than the cover price, especially if the time spent reading a gift book could have been better spent reading a better book we picked for ourselves.

Often a book is a presumptuous gift. It's a tangible way for the giver to demonstrate the superiority of his taste. Without the giver's latest discovery, the recipient's reading would be bereft of enlightenment and enjoyment, or so a lot of book givers seem to think.

A book gift brings guilt. How many gift books do I have sitting on my shelf? Actually, I have very few, as my curmudgeonly views on gift-giving scare away would-be givers. How many gift books do you have sitting on your shelf? Do they stare down at you, pleading with you to crack their spines, nagging you to toss aside your book and read them instead? It's bad enough having to live with all the books you bought for yourself that you haven't read yet; gift books just add more guilt to your pile.

A book gift breeds dishonesty. If you don't love the book, you'll probably tell the giver you did anyways. If you don't read the book, you'll make up excuses and eventually mumble something about liking it but not remembering much about it.

A book recommendation, on the other hand, is a wonderful gift.

I have very little time for anything in my life. Reading is important to me. I don't want to waste my precious reading time, so I lean heavily on book recommendations from people whose preferences, judgments and sensibilities calibrate well with mine. Even these recommendations miss more than they hit, often because our interests aren't synchronized at a particular time, but after sifting through a sheaf of these recommendations I can usually locate a great book for me.

So if you're in the mood to give the gift of reading, leave the books on the shelves and instead give recommendations. List five or ten books you've enjoyed recently, briefly explaining why you liked each book.  If you must yield to the realities of our consumer culture that measure a gift's value in money, you can include a gift certificate to your favorite book store with your recommendations, enabling your lucky recipient to buy one or two of your recommended books, or, if none of them look promising to him, to buy another book that suits his fancy.

Comments

[DarkoV]

If you don't mind my infringing on your blog copyright, I'll be printing out multiple copies of this post and enclosing it with a gift certificate (as you'd suggested). My friends, acquaintances, and I have been sucked into a vicious circle where we gift each other at this time of the year with books, (some that I, as a giver, have not even read but gave based solely on reviews...a double sin). These gifts are albatrosses around our necks, which we barely cut off before the next gift-giving season comes around. Thanks for the well-thought out piece. I know my friends will also be thankful.
a Q.: In your previous post, "Obstructions", was the irritant causing that blog entry the book-gifting conundrum you described in this entry?

[Outer Life]

"Obstructions" was motivated by something other than book gifting. Nothing obstructs my crankiness.

[DarkoV]

Dove-tailing from this blog entry and forming a joint with your "Book Reviews" section, any possibility of adding a "Five Books I should have liked and did" entry to the "Book Reveiws" section. Not that I'd necessarily buy them, but they could stand in as 5 culprits to list, when presenting a copy of this blog and a gift cert. Don't want to feed the crankiness; hope this serves as a sedative.

[i, squub]

Yeah, well... I had something to say about this but it started to run long, so it's over on my site.

[John Levett]

Just to let you know that I'm referring to your blog entry in mine! Thanks for some fine writing!

[mad]

I agree with this to the extent it refers to unsolicited or random gift books. I have received two such frustrating and ill-conceived gifts this season, and would have preferred a gift certificate to the hassle of exchanging.

But the giving of books has a time-honored tradition in my family, and no Hanukkah celebration would be complete without at least one gift book. What makes these gifts successful is the effort the giver makes to find out what book(s) the recipient actually WANTS to receive and read. For 15 years, my best friend and I have bought one another the hardcover versions of new books by beloved authors. We're both too cheap to ever buy hardbacks for ourselves, but we hate waiting to read the new stuff, so these books are always welcome gifts. My fiance asked me to pick out six books from my wanting-to-read list, then bought me two of those. I did not know which until I tore off the wrapping paper, and I was surprised and delighted with his choices. My dad lives for gifts of books, and always tells us which ones he's hoping to receive for his birthday or Hanukkah. In other words, the successful book gift simply requires a bit of thought and legwork.