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Martha Tod Dudman of Northeast Harbor is the author of “Dawn,” “Expecting to Fly,” “Black Olives” and “Augusta, Gone.” Her most recent novel is “Sunrise and the Real World.”
Do they really need more socks? Are they pining for more dish towels or the latest tech toy?
Why not skip all the useless gadgetry this year and simply give them a book? Let them recapture the joy they once felt as children by burrowing into a story on a cold winter’s night.
Give people books this year. Give them hope and give them escape. Books, after all, are the perfect gift. They’re not too expensive — think paperbacks! — and easy to wrap — so square!
They’re easily available, of course, online, but there are far more pleasant ways to buy them. Here in Maine, we’re lucky enough to have many wonderful independent booksellers. This year, give yourself the pleasure of wandering through the aisles of your local bookstore, discovering authors you’ve never heard of and some you may have forgotten. Who knows? You might even pick up a book for yourself while you’re at it.
Then you too can experience the utter, unmatchable joy of losing yourself in the book, whether it’s a stirring thriller that you gulp down in one sitting, a vaguely educational historical novel or maybe a torrid romance. Perhaps you’d prefer a travel adventure that takes you into the Amazonian jungle, or a big fat biography about some delectable, detestable, fascinating tech star or pop diva. There are books for self-improvement, memoirs of loss and redemption, mysteries and cookbooks, fantasy, horror and more.
Sometimes the art of reading is nearly forgotten, yet we are bombarded with studies — mostly conveyed on our phones – that tell us reading, especially fiction, strengthens our cognitive ability by forcing us to follow a narrative. It’s like learning a path through the woods, solving a mathematical equation, or following the intricacies of a conversation.
And how amazing — really! — to think that those squiggles and lines on the page can convey a story about a woman, distraught over some terrible man, finding salvation in Rome or a strange creature in the attic who menaces terrified children — or anything really — all waiting for us to open the cover and enter a different universe. Then everything else disappears — things that you need to do but don’t want to: meetings and dishes and tribulations. Conundrums, worries, regrets will recede as you follow the story into the forest of words.
And when you emerge, hours later, you will wake as if from a dream and those nagging duties and sorrows of life will all be diminished. You will return to the real world with a renewed heart and the knowledge that at any time you can go off to a room by yourself and enter that other place.
There is nothing like it, so why not share it with others?
There is no greater gift you can give this year than the gift of a book. It is so much more than a pile of pages. It’s a whole other world that awaits.
