The Geographer's Library would probably do your dad fine, esp. if he likes Dan Brown. I think it's not as deep or interesting or well told as Shadow of the Wind, but it may be the best you can do this year. I'll let the question percolate, though, because I might realize something else...

Does your mom like Oliver Sacks at all? Because Richard Powers's National Book Award winning novel The Echo Maker has as one of its central characters an Oliver Sacksian doctor. If she digs Mitchell and The Last Samurai, then it's likely she'll fall in love with my actual favorite writer of all time, Richard Powers. And The Echo Maker isn't a bad place to start with him.

I keep trying to read Toibin and I keep failing. I don't know why he's not holding my interest. Some Alice Munro I like, some I don't and I can't find a pattern, so I don't really follow her.

I don't remember whether your mom reads nonfiction, but one of the books that warmly resonated with me for a long time this year is Adam Gopnik's Through The Children's Gate. I like Gopnik and regularly read his articles and talk pieces in the New Yorker, but I hadn't quite realized what it would be like to read an entire collection of his essays in one gulp. Among other things, he writes about his children and their amusing foibles, the amusing foibles of Gopnik and his wife as they make decisions about their children, the illness and death of his best friend, what it means to live in Manhattan after the terrorist attacks of 2001, and his own psychoanalysis, in one of the gentlest yet most penetrating essays in the book.

This book is far more than the sum of its parts. I am probably susceptible to its charm because of my age and race, and I doubt that it would speak as clearly to much younger people or people who don't share some of the same cultural assumptions made in the book. On the other hand, although I love New York, I have never lived there. I'm not Jewish, and I have no children, so in those respects the book should not have been so touching to me. Yet it was. I think it's not for everyone, but I think that it is a wonderful addition for those to whom it speaks.

His earlier collection, Paris to the Moon, is also lovely, but it chornicles a different kind of era in the world and in his life. I read them out of sequence and it was no problem. If you think your mom & I have similar sensibilities, I would probably urge Through The Children's Gate on you.

I'll go back to percolating on dad now, lol. Oh, well, have you seen me rave about Jess Walter? Those are dadlike books, both The Zero and Citizen Vince. They're kind of highly intellectual (but not smarty pants in any way) spy/thriller or mafia/detective mystery (respectively) stories. My happiest finds of 2006 were Gopnik and Walter.


~~~~~

Love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart

-- WH Auden