Book gift guide

Sex, satire, fashion, food & literature: Nice and naughty books for everyone onyour list

The Story of O by Pauline Réage
Marie Lu's Legend series
Hugo Ortega’s Street Food of Mexico
Photo by Penny de los Santos
Grace: A Memoir by Grace Coddington
Building Stories by Chris Ware
America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't by Stephen Colbert

With less than a week left for holiday shopping, we at CultureMap would like to offer a happy medium between street brawls in Target and Neiman Marcus and just giving up and throwing gift cards at loved ones. How about a nice book?

The well-selected, gifted book literally and sometimes literarily tells a story to the receiver and has the ability to send many messages. I love you. I know you so well. I understand what you like. Please stop trying to force me to read 50 Shades of Grey.

So with a little help from our favorite independent bookstores, here is the CultureMap definitive, but completely random, book gift guide.

Contemporary literary reader

For the contemporary literary reader with shelves of signed copies and tales of meeting authors, pick up Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue. Chabon will be in Houston Jan. 28 for the first Inprint reading of the new year, so the book, a pen, and event ticket might be the perfect choice for this reader.

Movie lover

For the movie lover who’s just not into books, let him know Hollywood is with a gift basket filled with The Life of Pi, Cloud Atlas, Les Misérables (the book turned musical, turned movie), Anna Karenina, Jack Reacher, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and The Hobbit. Do readers' imaginations project at a 48-frames-a-second or 24?

Teen reader

If instead you’re shopping for a teen reader who wants to get into the next big series before the rest of the world flocks to the obligatory movie, Blue Willow Bookshop’s Valerie Koehler suggests the Legend series by Marie Lu, who used to call Sugar Land home.

“Post apocalyptic novels are still very hot this year. In this one, the main character is a teen who is slated to become an assassin and things turn treacherous when she is sent to kill a boy who may or may not have killed her brother. Lots of action which appeals to all teens,” says Koehler.

Food lover

Need a gift for a foodie who always buys locally? Try a cookbook by a favorite local chef. Hugo Ortega’s Street Food of Mexico is not only filled with his favorite recipes, but he includes personal stories to savor with each dish.

Fashionista

If that fashionista in your life loves the behind-the-scenes drama of the industry as much as the clothes, find some sophisticated gift wrap for Grace: A Memoir by Grace Coddington, the woman who managed to steal the spotlight from Anna Wintour in not one but two documentaries about Vogue.

Hipster satire-lover

Give the gift of historical irony to your favorite hipster satire-lover by pairing Stephen Colbert’s latest, America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't, with some ancient school Gulliver’s Travels because if Jonathan Swift were alive today, he’d no doubt have his own Super PAC.

Bibliophile

For the bibliophile who refuses to buy an e-reader and is looking for validation, Brazos Bookstore manager Jeremy Ellis recommends Chris Ware’s Building Stories: “An oversized box of 27 different booklets, each with a different format and point-of-view. This is a book to wade through rather than read start to finish. An eEdition would not be the same.”

Lovable luddite

And if that lovable luddite reader is raising little ones, Valerie Koehler recommends In My Den by Sara Gillingham because you can’t download the felt finger puppet that comes with the board book and then poke it through a Kindle.

Future forecaster

For the gambler, baseball stats lover, and fortune-teller in your life, let them know that the future can sometimes be forecast with The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don't, the new book by this nation’s recently chosen math-nerd-in-chief, Nate Silver.

An alternative to 50 Shades of Grey

And finally for that sweet, budding-sadist friend who won’t stop insisting you have to read 50 Shades of Grey, Brazos Bookstore recommends The Story of O by Pauline Reage.

Written in 1954, “The novel, originally published in French, is described as a story of love and submission. It won the French literary prize that year and has been in print ever since,” says Ellis, who also suggests Exit to Eden, Anne Rice’s S&M romance written under her pseudonym Anne Rampling.

If those suggestions don’t send the message, throw a hardback copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer your best friend's head. Carrie Fisher would approve.

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Movie Review

Billie Eilish takes fans behind the scenes in immersive 3D tour film

Photo by Henry Hwu/courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Billie Eilish in Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft - The Tour Live in 3D.

In 2021, at the tender age of 19, singer Billie Eilish was already the subject of a documentary, The World’s a Little Blurry. At that point, she had only released one album, so the film threatened to feel too early for such treatment. The ensuing five years have only made her a bigger star, though, so in many ways that movie now feels prescient for the person on display in the new concert documentary with the unwieldy title of Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft - The Tour Live in 3D.

Directed by Eilish and blockbuster filmmaker James Cameron, the film takes viewers inside Eilish’s 2024-2025 tour in support of her latest album, 2023’s Hit Me Hard and Soft. Filmed mostly at her series of shows in Manchester, England, the movie is a showcase for Eilish’s music, but it also serves as a smaller exploration of the type of person she is, as well as the impact she has had on her legion of fans.

The draw of the film is the use of Cameron’s beloved 3D technology, which he has employed in each of the three Avatar films. Unlike in those films, where the 3D has the odd effect of making the visuals too realistic for their own good, the technique brings an intimacy to the large-scale show that underscores the unique bond the singer has with her supporters.

Eilish and Cameron go back and forth between performances at the concert to behind-the-scenes sequences, detailing the enormous effort it takes to put on a show like that and how Eilish spends her time getting ready for it. As in The World’s a Little Blurry, this film continues to portray the singer as down-to-Earth, someone who yearns to maintain the connection to her fans that she’s had since she released her first single, “Ocean Eyes,” 10 years ago.

And as the many emotional songs in Eilish’s concert playlist prove, the feeling from the crowd is mutual. While Eilish has multiple bangers like “Bad Guy,” “Therefore I Am,” and the Charli XCX collaboration “Guess,” it’s the sad songs like “Everything I Wanted,” “Happier Than Ever,” and the Oscar-winning Barbie anthem, “What Was I Made For?” that hit the hardest. The depth of feeling emanating from her many sobbing fans singing along to crushing songs cannot be understated.

For audiences of the film, though, it’s the breadth of camera angles and shot choices that make it truly dynamic. There are cameras everywhere, including in the crowd, inside a cube at the center of the stage that rises and descends, following Eilish as she traipses every inch of the long, rectangular stage, and even a small one Eilish uses to bring an extra personal touch to the in-arena screen. Combined, they capture the complete energy of the concert, something that is not always the case in a film of this type.

Eilish has almost as many movies — two — as she does albums — three — which borders on overkill for a singer of her age. But both her music and the movies show her to be a person who knows the responsibility of being a celebrity, someone who understands that her fans are the reason she’s famous at all. Her career may go up or down from here, but it’s clear she’s already made a huge impact on those who love her most.

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Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft - The Tour Live in 3D opens in theaters on May 8.

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