Last-minute Christmas book gift ideas

How to Take Over the World

By Ryan North

This is a great gift for anyone who loves comic books and science fiction. Ryan North, an Eisner Award-winning writer for Marvel Comics, has written a thoroughly funny manual for how to become a supervillain and take over the world. You need to have a secret base for your illicit activities, set up a new country if possible, and study physics (to defy it), biology (to clone fierce dinosaurs or achieve physical immortality), meteorology (to control the weather)  and other pertinent subjects. Having spent his career figuring out ways by which his supervillain characters can beat the superheroes, North has an impressive grasp of a wide variety of scientific topics. And the book is also peppered with canny illustrations by comics artist Carly Monardo. 

Fright 1

Edited by Gwee Li Sui, Annaliza Bakri and Jason Erik Lundberg

For anyone who cannot wait for Halloween to come round again, this is the perfect book to gift them. There are 11 short stories in Epigram Book’s first annual anthology of Singapore horror, written by some of the country’s best writers including Dave Chua, Boey Meihan and O Thiam Chin. There are creepy MRT tunnels, an HDB toyol (a child spirit), a hospital phantom terrorising nurses during a pandemic, a centuries-old spirit haunting a grand mansion, and, of course, the ubiquitous pontianak. The writers have managed to suffuse this clean, safe and organised country with plenty of mysteries and terrors lurking under its cold, concrete surfaces.

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Because Our Fathers Lied

By Craig McNamara

Father-son relationships are often complicated. But perhaps not many are as complicated as this author’s relationship with his father, Robert McNamara, the former US secretary of defense who played a critical role in sending the US into the disastrous Vietnam War. The younger McNamara grew up disillusioned by his father’s public lies and eventually dropped out of Stanford University to travel through South America, protest against war and violence, and find happiness as a sustainable farmer. The book details one man’s agonising relationship with his father, but in a larger sense, also illustrates the generational differences in attitudes towards geopolitical power and domination.  

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An Immense World

By Ed Yong

How does Ed Yong do it all? After winning the Pulitzer Prize for his astute reporting of the pandemic printed in The Atlantic, the science journalist went on to publish this book in June 2022, detailing how different animals perceive the world they share with us. We humans sometimes assume we have superior sensory powers. But a fly can detect the tiniest changes in room temperature in a way that we cannot. A dolphin can echolocate not just us, but the very bones in our body. The bumblebee can detect ultraviolet hues beyond the rainbow’s edge. Yong’s book convinces us that the perceived human world is just a tiny fraction of the multitudes of “worlds” other species inhabit. And, like all good journalists, he manages to make complex explanations easy to read and enjoy.

Surrender 

By Bono

Come on, who does not like U2? The band’s frontman Bono, however, is something else. Occasionally pompous and grandiloquent, he has also rubbed people the wrong way with what is sometimes seen as a “white saviour complex”. Now he has put his larger-than-life personality on paper with this 576-page memoir, which has become one of the surprise bestsellers of 2022. It chronicles not just the making of U2’s music, but also his philanthropic efforts over the years. There is plenty of shoulder-rubbing and name-dropping (Steve Jobs, Bill Clinton, Oprah, the Kennedys, Frank Sinatra, among others). But there are also some great bits of revelation about U2’s indisputably great music.

All titles are available at Kinokuniya.