GIFTS WITH SHELF LIVES A selection of perfect presents that speak volumes by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 12-08-2002 When the holidays arrive, carrying their familiar mixture of joy and anxiety, I never worry about what to buy as gifts. The solution is always the same: books. Books last. Prices are too high, of course, but we live in the age of the ten-dollar movie ticket and the $4 cup of coffee. Books last for years. Long after publication, they can be taken down from shelves, read again, discussed, argued about, cherished, passed on to friends or grandchildren. Books have the power to celebrate or disturb, to make the world understandable, to make us more human. Here’s a list of some of the books – old standards and more recent works -- I’ll be buying as gifts this year: 1. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. This marvelous novel is as fresh today as it was when first published in 1883. Kids can read it and be thrilled, but even for adults, its narrative power is irresistible. The finest edition is from Scribner’s, with the gorgeous illustrations by N.C. Wyeth ($28). 2. Don Quixote. By Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Possibly the greatest of all novels. The young might find it comic; older people infinitely sad. But it’s a book layered with wisdom, stirring moments, all manner of human folly. Every one of us, men and women, are made up of the Illustrious Gentleman from La Mancha, and his more pragmatic companion, Sr. Panza. My favorite translation is by Samuel Putnam (Modern Library. $25.95). 3. Lost Illusions, by Honore de Balzac. One of the master’s finest novels, and the best novel ever written about journalism. I don’t read French, but the translation by Kathleen Raine seems excellent (Random House paperback: $13.95). 4. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. A great big muscular novel about greed, class, and the infuriating entanglements of the legal system. Dickens can do everything: stab you with tragic emotions, make you laugh, infuriate you. He’s also utterly shameless. In this novel he has one character spontaneously explode, and somehow convinces you that it really happened. Mr. Dickens would have been a masterful movie director.(I cherish the Oxford U. Press edition. $17.95) 5. The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor (Viking. $24.95). The Irish author is, for me, the greatest living short story writer but he is also a splendid novelist. In this heart-breaking novel, he manages in only 228 pages to move across more than 60 years of life in Ireland (and Italy) while stirring us to endless, echoing pity. 6. Manhattan Monologues, by Louis Auchincloss. (Houghton Mifflin. $25). The author has spent a lifetime revealing the hidden lives of the descendants of the old Knickerbocker elites, and there is simply no way to understand New York without reading him. These 10 short stories are like elegant pieces of chamber music, all told in the first person, each opening a small curtain into a world where the concept of mergers and acquisitions often extended to the marriage bed. His sense of irony is sharper than ever, along with his understated sympathy for all those people who were educated to be useless. 7. Blood of Victory, by Alan Furst (Random House. $24.95). This is the latest in an excellent series of novels set in Europe on the eve of – or in the early months of-- World War Two. Furst has a genius for place: you feel that you’ve lived in his Paris, or moved with him through the secret roads and rivers of Central Europe. He is also a true novelist. His characters (male and female) are complex, layered human beings, wary of the temptations of heroism, forced to act by the remorseless pressure of history. 8. In Ruins, by Christopher Woodward (Knopf. #24). A handsomely written, constantly surprising meditation upon ruins, from Rome to England, and the way they often provide consolation in the face of so much human folly. The book was finished before Sept. 11, 2001, but is now even more relevant to those of us who have been forced to gaze at our own fresh ruins. 9. It Happened on Washington Square. By Emily Kies Folpe. Johns Hopkins. $22.50. An excellent history of Washington Square, from potter’s field to stronghold of Bohemia, free of academic jargon, sparkling with fresh facts and insights. A must for any New York bookshelf. And from the Daily News family: 1. Long Time Gone, by Denis Hamill. (Atria/{Pocket Books. $25) Yes: he’s my brother, but this is a fierce, truthful novel about the way the Sixties came to Brooklyn, the wounds inflicted, the scars that never went away. Tough, sometimes appalling, but full of deep human pity. 2. Wild Pitch. By Mike Lupica (Putnam. $24.95) This is a superb novel, taking us deep inside the life of a baseball pitcher engaged in a comeback, presenting him to us as a rounded, flawed human being, without ever falling into bathos. Here, as in much of life, the most terrible wounds are often self-inflicted. As a novelist, Lupica has moved his game to another level altogether. 3. New York’s Bravest: Eight Decades of Photographs from the Daily News. (Powerhouse Books. $29.95) Edited by Shawn O’Sullivan, essays by Patrice O’Shaughnessy. Vivid proof that this newspaper did not discover the valor of the city’s firefighters on the morning of Sept. 11 2001. Our photographers have been at the scenes of fire-driven calamities – large and small -- from the first days of the newspaper’s existence. Their work gave disaster a human face, and is illuminated in this book by the powerful text of Patrice O’Shaughnessy.