The first year I worked in a bookstore — a "real" bookstore, a new bookstore, not a used bookstore — everyone got books for Christmas. There was, I confess, an element of convenience and frugality. I was there all the time; my staff discount was 30%. But I've never in my life done anything for purely practical reasons. Selfish ones, sure, but practical, no.

These weren't selfish gifts, though. In fact, they might be some of the least selfish gifts I've ever given. They were the results of months of seeing books in the store and having epiphanies: "Mom would like this!" or "That would be perfect for my uncle!" The gifts came to me, like magic. I was the Santa Claus of literature those Christmases that I worked in a bookstore.

Almost everyone on my gift list is a reader (there are a few exceptions, damn them) and I love giving people books. It's harder, though, now that I don't spend all my time with books. When I go to the bookstore, I gravitate to the books I expect I will like. I've got a type (ha!) and I don't often see beyond it. Working in a bookstore, I came across things that would be all wrong for me and perfect for someone else. To compensate for this, I have, over the past few years, developed a list of books that, if you know me, odds are you'll sooner or later receive at least one of. These are books I enjoyed, some are books that I think have been under-noticed, books that I think anyone I like would have to like, because I don't like people with bad taste.

Two non-fiction titles have traditionally been on this list (though I suspect that starting this year there will be one or two added). I've given several copies of Simon Winchester's first look at the Oxford English Dictionary, The Professor and the Madman. It's been several years since I read it, but I remember being fascinated by Winchester's exploration of the corps of volunteers that gathered the citations for the book (reminiescent, in its way, of Wikipedia's collective information gathering) but most of all by the eccentricity and obsession of those who would dedicate themselves to such a massive project. Plus, who doesn't enjoy a tale about an unlikely friendship? The definitive guide to the English language as the product of an academic and convict; it's a great bit of imagery.

The other non-fiction title that has been many-times-given is Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. Just the other day, I had yet another chance to use (ie, be a tedious know-it-all) with information gleaned from that book. I found it a bit of a slog at times, but it was worth it, to get Diamond's take on why wealth, the trappings of modernity and fancy-pants progress have come to the places that they have... and why other civilizations — established, sophisticated civilizations like the Maya — never took the same steps and were ultimately steamrollered by those that did. Diamond's book attempts to use adult reasoning to address a fundamental child's question: Why is there so much inequality in the world? It doesn't tell us why we don't fix it, or how to fix it, but it certainly gives perspective on how we got to here.

In the fiction realm, there are also two stalwarts. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-winning novel about... well, that's the thing. It's both an intimate, personal story and a huge, sweeping history. You could say it's the history of comic books, or Jewish America, or of New York City. It's about the life cycle of dreams, about imagination and possibility and friendship and love. It is a book with the potential to be all things to all people, and yet it is still a good book. A damn good book. Possibly my favourite book. I feel duty bound to share it.

The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. has a similarly epic scope. The first book in Ottawa-area author Sandra Gulland's triology about Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de Beauharnais, aka Mrs. Bonaparte, this was one of my working-in-a-bookstore finds. I would never have picked this one up on my own, not with its woman-on-a-sette painting cover and its historical subject matter, and especially not with the assumption that it was about the Napoleon/Josephine love affair. But a coworker raved and raved and raved about it (the same coworker, incidentally, who encouraged me to read Harry Potter, and we all know how that turned out) so I borrowed it from work. I was transfixed. I didn't leave my couch until I was done. Gulland's writing is beautiful, and she creates a Josephine who is so much more than Napoleon's wife. In fact, Napoleon doesn't even show up until quite a ways into the first book. I warn everyone I give this one to that they'll be hooked and that I cried my way through the last two-thirds of the final volume. Everyone who has been given the first one by me has gone on to read the rest of the series. (Ironically, I don't own any of these books, having borrowed the first one from work and the second two from an ex-boyfriend's mother.) This is a series that hasn't gotten anywhere near the attention it deserves.

I'm starting to exhaust this gift-giving repetoire, though. Either I need to add some new books to it, or else I need to make some new friends who haven't been subjected to my go-to gifts. Sometime, in the next week or two, I will carve some time out to go to the bookstores, the big box one and an indie or two. I will get a very, very big coffee (Gingerbread latte, my favourite $7 coffee of them all) and wander aisle after aisle, stroking the covers of the books and trying to picture a friend, a relative propped up on their couch, happily reading. Happy readings, after all, make for the happiest of holidays.