Top 5 Wednesday – Gifting Books

Top 5 Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Lainey at GingerReads and Samantha at Thoughts on Tomes.  You can find the group on Goodreads. 

This week’s topic:

Books to Give _____ as Gifts
— Create a recommendations guide for a person. Be creative with this. It can be simple such as “books for parents”, more elaborate like “books for Ravenclaws”, or expert level like “books for -insert your favorite fictional character here-“. You can even take out the category completely and have all 5 be suggestions for different types of people!

As a librarian I get asked for recommendations almost daily.  So I thought this one would be easy, I just had to pick a person or character.  And that is when the trouble began, I just couldn’t decide.  I also struggled with the gifting part.  I don’t ask for books as gifts myself, mostly because buying books is something I like to do, but except for my immediate family, I don’t buy them as gifts for other people. 

So I started thinking about books I have received as gifts, and my thoughts wandered to when I was a teen and the best gift my brother has ever given me.  A beautiful leather bound copy of The Hobbit.  I love this book and I still have it.  (If my house caught on fire, this is probably one of the books I would grab first) It also has beautiful color illustrations done by Tolkien. 

So, my mind then wandered to the last book I got as a gift, The Language of Thorns, another beautifully illustrated book.  My decision made, I came up with a list of beautifully illustrated books to give as gifts.  

1. The illustrated Harry Potter books for the Harry Potter lover.

 

You probably could have guessed that these would be on the list.  If you haven’t seen them I highly encourage you to check them out.  The first three have been done and Goblet will be out next year.  Jim Kay has been doing a fabulous job and I just love them.   I’m not one to buy second copies of books I already own, but I had to have these.  

 

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2. Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods for your favorite Demi God.  Illustrated by John Rocco. 

 

I love this version of the myths by Rick Riordan and John Rocco does a fabulous job with the illustrations.  Percy’s sarcastic remarks and wit make the myths so much more interesting.  If you have a little (or not so little) demigod in your life you can’t go wrong with this book. 

 

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3. The Books of Earthsea for the adult fantasy lover.

I read and loved these books as a tween, I still have my paperbacks, that are well loved.  I had no idea this book existed until I saw it in my local indie store a few weeks ago.  It is gorgeous, and the illustrator, Charles Vess did an excellent job capturing the books.  I’m sort of torn about getting it for myself, but if you have a fantasy lover, who enjoyed these books as a kid or teen, this would be the perfect gift.  I could just look at that cover and be happy. 

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4. The Language of Thorns for the fairytale lover.  

 

This book is not only full of beautiful illustrations, but the stories are wonderful too.  Even if the receiver of this book has not read any of the Grisha books, I still think they would enjoy the stories.  They are full of wonder and magic that will grip you until the end.

 

 

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5. The Complete Discworld Atlas for your fan.

I have been rereading the Discworld books lately, and was wondering what illustrated books exist for this fabulous series, and this is the one that looked the most interesting for that Discworld lover in your life.  There is also a Discworld collector’s series which I saw just yesterday, with fabulous covers, but I don’t think they are illustrated, so they didn’t quite fit on this list. 

The one book of Discworld that doesn’t exist as an illustrated book, but would be absolutely perfect is The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents.  I would so love to own a well done illustrated copy of this one.  

Sorry for the long winded intro to my thought process on this week’s topic, but I hope you enjoyed the list and found something to gift to a book lover in your life.  

Do you have a favorite illustrated book?