Yes, it's early, but our regular contributors are not the sort to recomend the ordinary for your Christmas list, so we are giving you time to shop around. But as you will see, their choices of best and worst gifts this year cause disagreements among themselves VICTORIA FINLAY The best thing about Christmas shopping is buying the kind of books you love for the people you love. This year there have been two books that had tremendous impact on me - for different reasons - and which have gone out on loan to friends time and time again.
The first is Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Fourth Estate, $170, and audio). It is a brave document by a life-loving man who on one very ordinary day suffered a very extraordinary stroke. He was left only able to communicate by blinking his left eye as a friend recited the alphabet.
The book was created over a period of two months in a nursing home as he came to terms with his life, and his coming death. It is full of joy as well as tragedy; I fear it might cause tears over the Christmas pudding, but the season is for angels singing as well as for merry gentlemen.
The appeal of my other 1997 rave is quite the opposite. Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding (Picador, $100, and audio) is frivolity incarnate, and I would give it to all my single 30-something friends, except I fear they have all read it. I know elsewhere on this page Bridget has been vilified as trivial, but could that be the view of what Bridget would call a 'smug married' type? Stocking fillers for fellow travel-lovers include Dava Sobel's lively Longitude (Fourth Estate, $68, and audio). Who would have believed in this satellite age that 200 years ago it was so tough to find out how far east or west one had travelled? For fellow dreamers I would buy Keith Dowman's The Sacred Life of Tibet (Thorsons, $220) in the hope that one day we will be able to visit such places in a spirit of openness.
GRAHAM WILDE An outstanding book published this year was the new translation of The Analects of Confucius by Simon Leys (Norton, $268 hardback, $150 paperback). This volume, though slim even in hardback, is packed with wonderful insights into Confucius' thinking.
It is not just the translation itself which is so memorable, but Leys' superb and comprehensive accompanying notes which account for more than half the book. A pleasure indeed.
Another immediate choice this year on a humorous plain is G Courtauld's Travels of a Fat Bulldog (Constable $280, Abacus $135). Courtauld - the bulldog - holds down two occupations, one as a gentleman farmer in England, the other as a queen's messenger, carrying diplomatic mail to and from embassies and consulates for the British Foreign Office.
