December free-for-all (#8)

Reading material I gifted to others for Christmas:

1. Neapolitan Chronicles to my younger nephew (last minute substitute for How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which I ordered on December 10 through our local bookstore but which still hadn’t arrived by December 24. If there was a novel titled How to Order a Book I would have gifted it to the store clerk.)
2. TIME magazine special edition on How Dogs Think to my sister-in-law, who lives with Millie the poodle and Maude the collie. Millie failed the towel test so the rest of the family thinks she’s a nincompoodle, but I see her as a free spirit who refuses to pander to the unwashed—and hence delightfully odiferous, to “normal” dogs—human masses.
3. Ottolenghi Simple to my older nephew and his partner. I debated at the bookstore whether to buy this cookbook or Jerusalem: A Cookbook. Fortunately I made the right choice, as my sister-in-law had hoped to buy them Ottolenghi Simple but the bookstore she went to was sold out and so she bought them Jerusalem: A Cookbook instead.
4. The White Angel  to my mother. She mainly reads mysteries and this one is a fictionalized account of the actual and unsolved murder of a Scottish nanny in Vancouver shortly after World War I. Bonus: I can read the book after she has finished it. 

Reading material others gifted to me:

1. The Haunting of Hill House, which I have already finished. I found it nearly impossible to put down, although I suspect Mark Twain would have laid it aside at times to go on a shooting spree (e.g., after reading this at the bottom of page 28 of the Penguin Classics paperback edition: “It had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions…”). 
2. An Ocean of Minutes. Someone knows my taste in books, for I had reserved this from the library before Christmas (and was #32 on the waiting list, for those who like trivia).
3. The Love & Lemons Cookbook, in which all recipes feature one main fruit or vegetable—ratatouille and other such medleys are vegetabliis non grata (gratin?)—and are grouped by said featured fruit or vegetable, in alphabetical order. The recipes look simple and sound delicious. Best of all: each comes with a photograph of the finished dish. Cookbook porn. When I’m certain nobody is watching I am often to be found flipping through and fondling the pages. 

Summation: I got as good as I gave.