Your son or daughter or niece or nephew, whether graduating from high school or college, wants money. If you wish, though, to also express your sentiments in a para-monetary fashion, you can do a lot worse than books. Graduation bobble-heads and other bric-a-brac are the stuff of landfills. Books biodegrade, and they can also inspire. So here are some gift choices, and we begin with some websites that might give you ideas.
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1001 Dollars You Must Give Before You Die
Okay, this isn't really a book. We want to keep this concept fresh in your mind: Give money.
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Beyond the Bedroom Wall
by Larry Woiwode
We're throwing a few novels onto the list, in case you don't think your grad will be interested in our self-help offerings. Beyond the Bedroom Wall novel tells the story of the Neumiller family, who begin their story in North Dakota and move to Illinois. The novel has been called "the Moby-Dick of midwestern literature," but don't let that scare you. It is moving, illuminating, scrupulously real to life.
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How to Read a Poem: and Fall in Love with Poetry
by Edward Hirsch
Whether a soul is graduating from high school or college or graduating from one moment to the next, poetry is needed. You should buy a copy of this for the grad and one for yourself. .
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The Last Gentleman
by Walker Percy
Another novel. Williston Bibb Barrett is a displaced Southerner who lives in New York City. He buys a telescope, takes it to Central Park, sees a woman through it and falls in love. Thus begins his return to the South. The novel is about one troubled man's search for identity, but it's also about a moment in American history: the civil rights struggles of the early 1960's. And it's also a novel with religious themes. And it's also funny.
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Nine Stories
by J. D. Salinger
More fiction. These stories were big with teenagers and young adults forty years ago. Most of them are still very good.
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So Long, See You Tomorrow
by William Maxwell
Fiction, again. This one is set for the most part in Lincoln, Illinois in the 1920's, and involves a farmer's murder. It's a short book, but novelist Michael Ondaatje said of it, "This is one of the great books of our age. It . . . contains our deepest sorrows and truths and love-all caught in a clear, simple style in perfect brushstrokes."
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Winter's Tale
by Mark Helprin
Peter Lake is a Manhattan burglar who is forever being pursued by a gang called the Short Tails. He is adopted by a runaway horse, falls in love with a woman whose house he's going to rob, and . . . and he moves through time. That last part is hard to explain. But then so is the whole book, which jumps from the turn of one century to the turn of the next and is brilliantly written, start to finish.
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