The Most Literary Season

Sometime before you pack your bag and head home for the holidays it hits you. An oasis of free time away from the academic grind is not the only thing staring you in the face; there is, also, the riddling annual question of what to get those folks waiting eagerly at home to embrace you.

You know you should probably take some time and shop along Newbury St., comb the Square, maybe go to Filene's. You give it some thought, and then return to your senses. You head to the bookstore. It's going to be another literary holiday for the relatives.

Despite tight economic times, cash registers are jingling as loud as ever at most bookstores this season. Things have gotten so jolly at nearby book stores it's easy to get waylaid by bad books on the way to the check-out. What follows is a guide to some of the modern morass of printed matter, as well as a sampling of which works qualify as more defensible acquisitions.

Students, store managers say, are turning more often to paperbacks, priced out of the hardcover market where costs are soaring 12 to 14 per cent annually. Many publishers are introducing a larger number of books as paperbacks to reduce costs. However, instead of producing a wide range of books, the paperback boom seems to be leading to a surfeit of books about dead and/or fat cats.

101 Uses for a Dead Cat, Garfield books, and the chuckle-filled Cat's Revenge: More Than 100 Uses for Dead People continue to enchant book-buyers into the holiday season. These are the most popular and sadistic of a slew of books on felines, all of which are completely unsuitable as gifts for your literate acquaintances. You can laugh heartily and from Great Comic Cats, you can learn the history of cat drawings from the 17th century to the present. You can learn to use cats as scooters and rakes and human corpses as insulation and hammocks. You can also digest each of these $3 or $4 books in three to four minutes.

Regretably, most other books this season don't deserve more than a cursory glance. With any of three books, you can divine the answer to the Rubik's cube puzzle; the people who twist the multi-colored square for hours every day can now spend more time reading about it. You Can Do The Cube, by a 12-year-old British whiz-kid who probably has no friends, is the most popular.

Other paperbacks are challenging the cats and cubists for popularity, adding to a growing list of literary ways to waste our national forests. Sailing, a humorous dictionary for the boating enthusiast, offers knee-slapping definitions; "current", for example, means "tidal flow that carries a boat away from its desired destination, or toward a hazard." Pretty funny, huh? And the all-new Bathroom Almanac aims at giving you a digestible amount of trivia every day. With books like these, who needs toilet paper?

But not all of this year's paperbacks make lousy gifts. There are some first-rate, first-run softcovers available, usually tucked out of sight behind the best-selling cat display. Some of the best works are moderately priced oversized books on rock and roll. The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years incorporates the work of many rock writers and is a heavily-illustrated authoritative history of Mick, Keith and the boys from the beginning. A comprehensive collaborative effort, the book is a fascinating history; its innovative layout also makes it fun to read.

A few other books on rock are selling well this season and deserve their $12-plus pricetags. Two books chronicle English-rock-innovator-turned-serious-actor David Bowie; the best of which is a wide edition called Bowie: An Illustrated Record. The Book of Rock Lists by Rolling Stone critics Dave Marsh and Kevin Stern is chock-full of lists of groups with the worst names, the best clothes and other minutiae. Christgau's Record Guide by Village Voice critic Robert Christgau describes--and grades--the rock albums of the past decade. And The Compleat Beatles, a $13.95 compendium of sheet music, interviews and pictures, makes a wonderful goft for the avid Beatle fan, though not for the relative who didn't get "Sgt. Pepper" until last Yuletide.

If rock doesn't satisfy Ma, Pa, and Gramps, there are other fine paperbacks. The People's Doonesbury by Gary Trudeau (who else?) is another oversized collection of past cartoons; these excerpts from 1978-80 are particularly interesting because they are accompanied by previously muted comments from the satirist. Poland: Solidarity: Walesa is a well-written study of Poland during recent years, including a discussion of the current strife. A host of photographs accompanies the authoritative writing of three veteran journalists.

Little sister or brother might just like The 3rd Whole Kids Catalog, the updated version of the book that suggests hundreds of ways to sweat out childhood. But they won't like four of these: it's a fair bet Grandma and Aunt Betty will go for this, so look a little harder. If you want that sibling to grow up very fast, Shock Value by John Waters will do it. Written by the filmmaker who made "Pink Flamingo" and who once wrote that "If someone vomits watching one of my films, it's like a standing ovation," this work chronicles Waters' cult films. It claims to reveal the line between "good bad taste and bad bad taste."

Tom Wolfe's paperback version of In Our Time and a very technical appraisal of 1980s U.S. military strength called Arsenal of Democracy II, both make reasonably priced quality gift ideas.

But, for America's conspicuous consumers, paperbacks just won't do. Despite the rising prices, hard-cover books remain plentiful and popular. A bunch of fine works indicate why. The fall novels by John Updike and Irving--Rabbit is Rich and The Hotel New Hampshire, respectively--continue to ring up big sales months after their releases. Of course, these books were virtually insured of popularity, being descendants of previous block-busters--Updike's American Rabbit Angstrom and Irving's macabre writing about writers and bears.

Colleen McCullough's An Indecent Obsession follows her block-busting Thorn Birds; that's probably a better reason to buy her newest novel than its unconvincing World War II story line. But Mom and Dad loved McCullough's first book, and they'll probably love you for getting them this book by the same author.

A new novelist this season is celebrity David Niven, whose new book is set in the high society that he knows best. Go Slowly, Come Back Quickly is composed of the stuff of which so many best sellers are made--but it may be just far enough between a Judith Krantz work and a serious novel to make it a tolerable gift.

You can do better in the bestseller section. Check out Jane Fonda's Workout Book, for instance. From sexpot to anti-war activist to movie star to mother to avid jogger who exercises "until I am dripping with sweat," Jane here leads her troops through arm stretches, back leg extensions and more.

Other be-a-better-person books include and expanded version of Let's Stay Healthy: A Guide to Lifelong Nutrition by the late Adelle Davis.

And the popular How To Make Love to a Man distinguishes itself from other sex-improvement books because it is by a journalist who had to ask doctors and males the questions instead of answering them on the basis of lifelong medical or therapeutic research. The Best of Dear Abby devotes a full chapter to the chronic world-wide problem of snoring spouses. In the compendium's final chapter of funny and pathetic letters, one woman writes earnestly "It there anything in insecticides that excite a man?...(Arthur) gets especially aroused right after he sprays our2