Gift Ideas

It's so hard to choose a good new book from the amazing variety of creations. There are so many different authors, styles and ideas - it can spin your head. Books are a very personal gift, but you can still enjoy some advice and narrowing down of the choices. Here are five interesting new books you might wanna try:

#1

Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals - by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson

The best-selling animal advocate offers the most exciting exploration of how animals feel since The Hidden Life of Dogs.

#2

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death: A Novel - by Charlie Huston

With a style that is razor sharp, an eye that never shies from the gritty details, and a taste for stories that simultaneously shock, disturb, and entertain, Charlie Huston is one of a kind. And The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death is the type of story–-swift, twisted, hilarious, somehow hopeful--that only he could dream up.

#3

The Middle Place - by Kelly Corrigan

Newspaper columnist Corrigan was a happily married mother of two young daughters when she discovered a cancerous lump in her breast. She was still undergoing treatment when she learned that her beloved father, who'd already survived prostate cancer, now had bladder cancer. Corrigan's story could have been unbearably depressing had she not made it clear from the start that she came from sturdy stock.

#4

Scarpetta (Kay Scarpetta) - by Patricia Cornwell

Leaving behind her private forensic pathology practice in Charleston, South Carolina, Kay Scarpetta accepts an assignment in New York City, where the NYPD has asked her to examine an injured man on Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric prison ward. The handcuffed and chained patient, Oscar Bane, has specifically asked for her, and when she literally has her gloved hands on him, he begins to talk—and the story he has to tell turns out to be one of the most bizarre she has ever heard.

#5

2666: A Novel - by Roberto Bolano

2666, the 898-page novel he sprinted to finish before his early death in 2003, again showing Bolaño's mesmerizing ability to spin out tale after tale that balance on the edge between happy-go-lucky hilarity and creeping dread.