Photo [cropped image] via Flickr Creative Commons
Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
The perfect gift for: Your mom
What you’re really saying: “Your new boyfriend is not my dad and I’m going to make things very difficult for you.”
The perfect gift for: Your absent father
What you’re really saying: “See what happens when you ignore your kid?”
The perfect gift for: Your boyfriend
What you’re really saying: “You’re always late, and I have other options.”
The perfect gift for: Your daughter
What you’re really saying: “Stop complaining about your school.”
My Friend Dahmer, by Derf Backderf
The perfect gift for: Your son
What you’re really saying: “Your current friend is not good. I would like you to find a new friend.”
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Picketty
The perfect gift for: Your Ronald Reagan-worshipping stepbrother
What you’re really saying: “After reading a review of this book, I feel it crystalizes what I meant to say when I called you a fascist last Christmas. I pray to the Goddess that this Frenchman’s words ‘trickle down’ deep into the dark crevasse of your prematurely wizened, capitalism-loving soul.”
The Lucifer Effect, by Philip Zimbardo
The perfect gift for: Your new boss
What you’re really saying: “This new power is going to your head.”
No Exit, by Jean-Paul Sartre
The perfect gift for: You loudmouth coworker
What you’re really saying: “Hell is: other people, generally; you, specifically.”
Life in a Medieval Village, by Frances Gies and Joseph Gies
The perfect gift for: Your new intern
What you’re really saying: “Welcome to my fiefdom, peasant.”
The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
The perfect gift for: Your mailman
What you’re really saying: “I know you don’t always deliver all of my mail. There are other mail distributors I can use if you don’t give me that Lands’ End catalog back.”
The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The perfect gift for: Your landlord
What you’re really saying: “Can I paint in here?”
Tags: books, holidays, louisa hager
I am passive-aggressively gifting “Bad Feminist” to people, what am I really saying, besides “I have excellent taste”
The Iliad
Perfect for: your hawkish cousin
What you’re really saying: “Go die in a pointless war.”
The Road
Perfect for: your libertarian little brother
What you’re really saying: “Is this what you really want? Also, call dad.”
I’m not sure what getting my mom a book of Emily Dickinson poems means… I’d prefer/ if you spoke/ in shorter/ sentences, maybe?
(Also, I think the image used for this post might be CC licensed, but I can’t find any attribution for the source anywhere? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Union_Catal… )
I searched and searched and couldn’t find a source either! I decided to swap it out for a different photo.
Moby-Dick
The perfect gift for: Your roommate
What you’re really saying: You are never going to finish reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and I’d like you to stop trying and clean the bathroom.
You might also be saying “From hell’s heart I stab at thee!”
“Shut up and appreciate your perfect boyfriend already!”
<sigh> Queequeg….
I love this thread.
The subtext is real.
The Catcher in the Rye
Perfect for: your younger sibling
What you’re really saying: “This won’t make you more introspective, but at least you can’t talk while reading it.”
Bartleby the Scrivener
Perfect for: your boss
What you’re really saying: “I would prefer that you not bother me while I dick around on the internet for eight hours a day.”
This is why I carry around my Bartleby mug on the job.
Slammed thumbs up so hard it gave me a little warning box. Where did you get this marvelous thing?
It was embarrassingly expensive for a mug, but here it is.
http://www.mhpbooks.com/merchandise/mug/
Bless you.
I MUST HAVE THIS.
RELEVANT TO MY LIFE
I need this for grad school. And life.
and now I’ve found the perfect Christmas gift I was looking for!
The Portrait of a Lady
Perfect for: The friend with poor judgement
What you’re really saying: You are great and majestic but have a bad taste in men. Ditch your douchy boyfriend now please.
The Sorrows of young Werther
Perfect for: Sibling who won’t get over a break-up
What you’re really saying: STOP SAYING NO-ONE UNDERSTANDS YOUR PAIN EVERYBODY UNDERSTANDS YOUR PAIN. WERTHER WAS A SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE LONG BEFORE YOU. STOP WRITING MOPEY POETRY NOW. IT WASN’T FUN THEN AND IT ISN’T NOW. I’M NOT READING 10 MORE PAGES OF YOUR FEELINGS. (i.e get over it)
Dante’s inferno
Perfect for: Your nemesis
What you’re really saying: You’re putting me through hell. Stop or I’ll immortalize your dickishness in poetry forever.
King Lear
Perfect for: Your dad
What you’re really saying: I am actually a great daughter – I haven’t plotted against you once this year. (p.s I totally didn’t call for the past fortnight because I couldn’t find the words to say how much I love you. I definitely was not hungover and lazy)
STOP SAYING NO-ONE UNDERSTANDS YOUR PAIN EVERYBODY UNDERSTANDS YOUR PAIN.
Beautiful.
I feel like The Odyssey might convey something more like “your several-years-long dalliance on a Greek island has not affected my loyalty to you”.
Gone Girl
Perfect for: a Man
What you’re really saying: “I’m all up in the bank with the funny face (and if I’m fake, I ain’t notice cause my money ain’t)”
aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh
i’m a mothafuckin MONSTAH
Other options, if you’re not the passive-aggressive type:
Aggressive-aggressive. “I really think you should read this. As soon as possible. You’ll know why when you finish.”
Self-indulgent. “I bought you this book, but I want to read it when you’re finished, so let me know.”
Clueless. “I bought this book you’ve probably already read at Barnes and Noble and they’ll give you store credit if you return it, so go get something you want to read.”
(also: Piketty, no “c.”)
I gave my friend “Texts from Jane Eyre” as a birthday present solely for the self-indulgent reason. Although I have since received a couple of B&N gift cards, so I might as well buy my own copy now.
My mom did the opposite once – she gave me a passive-peaceable book. It was Sing You Home by Jodi Picault. I read it and had to confront her with – that was a terrible book. I know your sensibilities about books (she was an Englsih teacher for chrissake!) so I know you know that was a terrible book. You can just straight out tell me that you’re ok with me having a female partner and that we’re having a kid.
She laughed and blushed. I was so right.
What you’re really saying: “Your current friend is not good. I would like you to find a new friend.”
A boy like that will kill your brother. You should leave that boy, and find another.
The Art of War
For: your best frenemy
What you’re really saying: I require a worthy opponent. Study up, bitch.
The Awakening
Perfect for: your husband/boyfriend
What you’re really saying: Man up or I’m out of here.
The Awakening
Perfect for: your husband/boyfriend
What you're really saying: Man up or I'm out of here.
It is plainly factual, and not a mother-in-law joke, to report that a few years ago, my mother-in-law, who is a lovely person, gave me a community-generated book, much like those community-generated cookbooks full of recipes from church groups or local organizations, but this was a book on basic household cleaning, with a spiral spine so it could lay flat on a counter while I, for example, scrubbed out my bathtub or washed her son’s clothes in borax or got on my hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor, as recommended in the book. Because clearly the only reason I was not doing these chores adequately was a lack of knowledge like I might gather from a community of elders.
It is also plainly factual to report that the book on cleaning our home which my mother-in-law gave me as a Christmas gift in real life and not in some clichéd mother-in-law joke, clearly had not been vetted by anyone knowledgeable, as it occasionally recommended such potentially fatal cleaning tips as mixing bleach with ammonia. So not only didn’t I use it, I had to throw it in the trash rather than giving it to Goodwill.
Are you sure she wasn’t trying to kill you?
This is when you say “Thanks but I already have Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk”
My shrewish mother in law gave me “Cider House Rules” for Christmas, shortly after being informed that her daughter was pregnant.
25 years later and I still haven’t been able to forgive her utter insensitivity.
“When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us: Letting Go of Their Problems, Loving Them Anyway, and Getting on with Our Lives”
Perfect for: Your hypercritical folks/in-laws.
Because why would half-ass passive-aggressive when you can be full-on aggressive-aggressive!
A boyfriend once gave me Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In retrospect the lesson there was “I love you, but I will never love you as much as I love Philosophy of Math.”
Ethan Frome
Perfect for: The elder relative going on about how easy kids these days have it.
What you’re really saying: If your life actually sucked so much it was probably your fault. Shut up. SHUT UP.
My hobby is giving a copy of Ethan Frome to all my friends who move to New England from a warmer climate. In case they didn’t get the memo about needing a good winter coat, and also the potential hazards of sledding.
And never, ever, drop the pickle dish.
Harry Potter Series
Perfect For: Your friend who calls themselves a fan and considers watching the movies to be the same thing as reading.
What you're really saying: Read the damn books before I bludgeon you to death with them.
I gave three of my five kids Good Omens this year. I’m not sure what my passive-aggressive self was thinking. My conscious self was thinking “I really enjoyed this book, and I think you will too–two of you because of Crowley, since you’re into Supernatural, and one of you because you have openly campaigned for light reading for spring, and just because the other light reading I gave you is Dad is Fat doesn’t mean I think you’re fat, because while you could stand to lose a few pounds I can raise you by orders of magnitude on the bathroom scale, and you’re a doctor so we aren’t even having that conversation passive aggressively.”
High Fidelity: perfect gift for your sister’s jerk of a way older boyfriend who has always reminded you of asshole Ian.
What about when your much older boss gives you Tess of the D'Urbervilles and the French Lieutenant's Woman at the same time?