Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

naomikritzer has posted her annual guide to buying gifts for people you're pressured into buying something for: "to help you express your dislike with all the tact of Joe Biden writing an epitaph for Henry Kissinger."

Like every year, Naomi notes both that many of these would be good gifts for someone else, and that unfortunately a lot of people are in situations where not getting something for certain relatives or acquaintances could lead to fights they don't want to have. At least once in the past, I have read one of her descriptions and thought it sounded delightful, because one person's eye-searingly bright color is another's favorite.

This year, Naomi says that her new book, Liberty's Daughter, would be the perfect gift for a certain sort of Libertarian blowhard. Similarly, Waubgeshig Rice's novel Moon of the Crusted Snow is about people surviving an apocalypse in northern Ontario, and could be given to "white dude gun-collecting survivalists," who would almost certainly be home from the family gift-exchanging event before they got far enough into the book to realize that people like them are the bad guys here. (Disclaimer: I have read neither of these, though Naomi's is on my kindle, along with some other things that I will get to after reading Permutation City for my online book club.)