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I don’t so much buy presents… except for the kids in my life. Once they’re seven or eight, I have no problems: so many books I know and love already, and of course I welcome any excuse to find more great ones. Best of all is when the child’s tastes run to slightly different genres than I usually read, so I’m forced to read up… I first read China Mieville’s UN LUN DUN and Nancy Farmer’s THE EAR, THE EYE AND THE ARM when testing them for my cousin Alex. (Both passed.)

But when it comes to littler kids, I’m at a loss. I don’t really know what’s age-appropriate, and I don’t know what’s so famous that they’re likely to have it already. Luckily, I now have a blog. And with a blog comes links. My savior this year? 100 Scope Notes’s Best New Books category. Holiday success.

The most gratifying gift-giving moment was undoubtedly due to my cousin Luke’s — Luke of Mean Elizabeth fame — preschool apparently having taught him appropriate responses to receiving a present. As soon as he ripped the paper off of JEREMY DRAWS A MONSTER, he yelled, “It’s JUST what I ALWAYS WANTED!”

As opposed to my niece Sylvia of the same age, whose perpetual response ran more to looking hopeful and asking, “Are there any more presents for me?”

Sylvia also took the time to read several of her favorite books to me. Since she doesn’t read in the traditional sense, this involves her telling me a story based on the pictures and what she remembers from past readings. In her telling, a common feature of stories seems to be their emphasis on YELLED NARRATION.

My other interaction with small children this holiday season was when Emily and I went sledding in Prospect Park. (I’ve recently learned to sled and have now become a sledding fiend. I wanted to take Sylvia out yesterday but the snow had dissipated.) We took it upon ourselves to teach them some valuable lessons about the importance of moving off the hill once your turn is done, lest two shrieking women lying on top of one another in an inflatable bialy run you down. I’m not sure whether all their parents were as grateful as they should have been for our didactic efforts.

“I mean, as well as being a fascist he’s just not very clever.”

– China Mieville, THE CITY & THE CITY

Finals update: They are ongoing, and paaaaiiiinful. I am writing a paper about something called frailty. I have made all possible jokes concerning my own mental frailty, how the paper is contributing to my frailty, the similarity of the words FRAIL and FAIL and the significance of this linguistic fact for likely outcomes of my paper… not to mention some ‘jokes’ along these lines that, in retrospect, were certainly not possible. Uck.

I mentioned before how Jennifer Donnelly’s A NORTHERN LIGHT may have been inspired by Dreiser’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, but just because that’s what got her to create the story I love, doesn’t mean I think it belongs in the book.

I have similar feelings about China Mieville’s UN LUN DUN. His first (and only to date) young adult novel — although he has a new adult novel coming out right about now — UN LUN DUN came about, according to an interview I read, because Mieville had an image of killer giraffes. And he knew that was fully awesome. And also, he knew you couldn’t write such a thing for adults.

Meanwhile, I love UN LUN DUN — I love its characters and its wordplay and its whimsy and its politics, which make it moving to me — but the giraffes, which I support in theory, are actually a tiny part of it. Although Mieville’s illustration of a killer giraffe is pretty cool, I think the whole species could have been cut from the book without much loss.

Which is just one of those little things that interests me about the writing process in general. And also, is the reason why our new category for crazy monster books is called “Vampires, zombies and killer giraffes.” This category is motivated by my desire to no longer have to tag every vampire book as being related to TWILIGHT just so they’re all collected in one place.

Also, speaking of crazy awesome monsters: Yes, I am excited about Diana Peterfreund’s book RAMPANT, which is about killer unicorns. And yes, I was made insanely happy by this link (from Oz and Ends): PINOCCHIO: VAMPIRE SLAYER.

How awesome?!