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5 Classic Books To Gift in Hardcover This Christmas

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New York Times best-selling and LGBT author Mark Scarbrough, whose literary memoir Bookmarked: How the Great Works of Western Literature F*cked Up My Life came out recently, suggests the best classics to gift in hardcover this holiday season for your book-loving friends and family.

Scarbrough, says: “Years ago, I decided that as a committed book lover, I didn’t want to hold cheap paperbacks in my hands as I reread my favorite classics. I wanted the heft, the weight, the gravitas of the real thing. That is, a hardcover book. I want to treasure that copy for years. Any book lover on your holiday shopping list may well feel the same. So here’s a list for you to up the ante, go for broke, and get the a great hardcover for the book lover in your life this holiday season. Maybe you’ll even snag one for yourself!”

George Eliot, Middlemarch I’ve read Middlemarch at every big juncture of my life: when I got married the first time, when I came out, when I moved to New York City, when I got married the second time, and when I moved to rural New England. No wonder, because Middlemarch contains the world. Or at least all of the world on a tiny piece of English soil. Plus, Eliot wrote a novel of novels: a sociological study, a romance with a sympathetic heroine, a bildungsroman of an young artist, and a tragedy of an old man who will never finish his life’s work, all mixed up with a nasty murder. It’s a world of literature in one volume.

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy Dante’s masterwork was the first book I bought (in hardcover, too!) when I decided I could handle the great books again. For the last decade or so, I’ve even read Dante’s masterwork at the start of every year. Sometimes, I get through the whole thing in a week. Sometimes, I savor it through March. I’ve gotten so obsessed with Dante’s stroll across his known universe that I started the only podcast to slow-walk through the work line by line (“Walking With Dante”). Do what I did: Look for a hardcover with illustrations. Some of the best are by Gustave Doré.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina Don’t stint. Go with the best: the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Tolstoy’s classic. You need all that pulpy bulk to properly contain a 900-some-odd pager allegedly about the tragedy of Anna but really about the comedy of Konstantíne Lévin, the idealist who survives intact despite the odds. (Two novels for the price of one!) With its unbelievable scope and undeniable brilliance, Anna Karenina should feel heavy in your hand.

Emily Dickinson, Poems Since the 1950s, there have been lots of editions of her jagged, gorgeous, elliptical poems. But editors always try to put them in some orderly format that doesn’t represent how this great poet left the work at her death. To remedy that problem, look for Cristianne Miller’s Emily Dickinson’ Poems: As She Preserved Them. Miller’s is the first edition to reproduce the poems in the little sewn-together bundles exactly as Dickinson left them. The book also reproduces all of the poems she left on loose sheets and those she sent to others but didn’t keep herself. Miller’s is the best way to savor at Dickinson’s art: the way she wanted it read.

Homer, The Odyssey  What book lover doesn’t need a gorgeous, hardcover copy of the greatest epic? And don’t even think about any translation but Emily Wilson’s. It’s readable, funny, sexy, and graphic. In other words, a blast to read because Wilson captures the romp that is Odysseus’s trip home from the wreck of Troy. It’s even fun to read her translation out loud, about as it would have been recited millennia ago.

Get a hardcover this holiday for the book lover in your life. It’s a treasure and a thoughtful way to remember you for years to come.

Scarbrough knows his classics – he teaches eight-week seminars on Virginia Wolf, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison and leads an international book group of more than 150 committed readers who work through challenging fiction while zoom-sipping wine. He has also published 35 cookbooks with his husband, and just released his literary  memoir: Bookmarked: How the Great Works of Western Literature F*cked Up My Life. (Propertius Press, Sept. 23, 2021).

Scarbrough has been featured on outlets like TODAY- NBC, The View, Good Morning, America, NPR’s Morning Edition, Fox and Friends, and The Martha Stewart Show.

Visit his site here.

 

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