Is there any greater present than the gift of books?
A friend recently bought me a battered old western from a charity shop. It’s a pulpy paperback from the seventies. The hero is marketed as “a new kind of western hero”, the kind of hyperbole that really puts me off. The character ends every chapter with a one-line wisecrack, some of which make literally not sense given the era the story is set in. Yet I really enjoyed its dark, fast-paced approach to storytelling, as well as dipping into a genre I seldom read.
This is the thing about books as gifts. What you receive might not be exactly what you would buy for yourself, but it almost always presents you with something new, some thought you might not have had or perspective you might not have considered. And sometimes you hit on a real gem.
