Quirky Books 

Aside from lotto tickets, it’s hard to think of a gift with a greater upside then a book. If your beloved doesn’t fall for the latest Donna Leon mystery, she can put it down after 20 minutes and a have nice piece of décor, or a gift for the charity shop. Little time wasted. But if, for some reason, the book speaks to her, she has eight hours of enjoyment to look forward to. And on top of that, a lifetime memory of having been inside that book'something only blunt trauma and age can take away. Here’s a mini guide to what’s out there in the stores that looks like it could stand the test of time.

For your friend with the sneaky comic habit: The Absolute Sandman, by Neil Gaiman (Vertigo, $99). Purists might crave the original issues, wrapped in plastic and laminated from all those damaging elements. Most, however, will salivate for Vertigo’s boxed, slip-cased set that collects issues 1 through 20 of Gaiman’s groundbreaking series and adds collector ephemera like his original proposal for the series and early sketches.

For the girlfriend who ran off with your heart: The Mystery Guest, by Gregoire Bouillier (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18). In 1990, Bouillier’s phone rang, and he heard the voice of the woman who had left him five years before without a word or an explanation. She was calling not to apologize but rather invite him to a birthday party. The Mystery Guest describes the mental somersaults he does as he prepares to face the woman who ruined his life one last time.

For the dad you fear won’t ever read a book again: The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson (Riverhead, $26.95). David McCullough isn’t the only literary defibrillator for dads who have let their minds grow cobwebs. Steven Johnson has hugely compelling book on computers, ants, pop culture, and now about the worst outbreak of cholera in human history. Hardly sounds like a scintillating even read, but this book moves like a 19th-century novel and has all the grit and drama of a cliff-hanging episode of 24.

For the guy who keeps threatening to leave the country if Bush isn’t impeached: Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America, by Mark Ehrman (Process, $16.95). This earnest little book will tell you everything you need to know about getting out of the good old U.S. of A., from how to acquire foreign citizenship to where English is spoken, providing testimonials along the way. “Dubai is expat heaven,” says one person. “They have just opened one of the largest indoor skiing mountains.nn

For the hipster: Up is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, edited by Brandon Stosuy (New York University Press, $29.95). Long before Starbucks took over Greenwich Village, and one-bedroom rents hit $3,000, downtown Manhattan was scuzzy, vibrant and alive with the arts. Collecting the work of rock-star poets and beat-down bohemians, this book attests to the fact that the life portrayed in Mary Gaitskill’s edgy work wasn’t a dream.

For the atheist who won’t be celebrating any gosh-darn holidays: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, $26). Herein the great scientist and proclaimed atheist takes aim at faith, which he believes is simply a whole lot of pablum.

For the aspiring writer: The Paris Review Interviews Vol. 1 (Picador, $16). The Paris Review series of interviews with writers is the book fiend’s potato chip: It’s impossible to read just one. Now, you don’t have to. This collection pokes, prods and pries more than a dozen great poets and novelists into admitting their techniques and their fears. “Interviewer: Do you feel as though you’re up there without a net under you?” Vonnegut: “And without a balancing pole, either. It gives me the heebie-jeebies sometimes.nn

For the relative who is always giving away money to the homeless: Stuart: A Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters (Delacorte, $20). In this miraculous and beautiful little book, Masters spins, in reverse, the incredible life story of a man he found drunk on the street in Cambridge. He follows doomed Stuart from their first run-in, back through crimes, prison, juvenile hall, suicide attempts and special schools.

For the ardent feminist and current-events junkie: The Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (Henry Holt, $32.50). She drank with the guys and then beat them to the scoop, married Hemingway and survived. Gellhorn lived a 21st-century life in the 1940s'and this big, luscious collection of letters fills us in on all the dramatic back story to each chapter of her eventful life.

For the fiction-lover: The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany (Harper Perennial, $13.95). Al Aswany’s runaway best seller has finally made it to this country in paperback, and it does not suffer in translation. The book unfolds around the time of the first Gulf War in a Cairo apartment block that has seen better times. The characters range from the 65-year-old cosmopolitan Zaki Bey, who has loved more women than Casanova, to Hatim Rasheed, the editor of a prestigious Cairo weekly and regular customer of the gay bar downstairs, Chez Nous. Hilarious, soulful and bawdy, it’s a tale like Dickens would’ve written had he been born in Cairo.