1996 Christmas List

• 1. What's Right, by David Frum, 1996. $9.60. A collection of his magazine articles on politics and culture. Lots of apt phrases and good ideas, and inspiration for the rest of us to try to write so well.

• 2. The Hercule Poirot Mystery TV series, $20 per episode, 1992. Agatha Christie is not half so good on paper, maybe because much of the pleasure in watching this series comes from the interwar English civility and scenery.

• 3. The Dark Wind, by Tony Hillerman, 1982. $4.79. A top-notch Jim Chee novel, about Hopi Indians (as well as Navahoes) and cocaine being lost in the desert.

• 4. Game Wars: The Undercover Pursuit of Wildlife Poachers, by Marc Reisner, 1991. $8.80. An exciting book about poaching in Louisiana. True crime, but with fish and game violations instead of axe murders.

• 5. The HTML computer language. This is what one uses to write up a WWW page. It is easy to use, well-designed and good for formatting, in its limited way.

• 6. Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest: True News of the World's Least Competent People , by John Kohut and Roland Sweet, 1996. $7.96.Curious stories of strange happenings, drawn from their column in the free newspapers.

• 7. The Problem of Pain , by C.S. Lewis, 1940. $4.80.Not about pain so much as life, experience, God, and salvation. Good ideas such as man's feeling for the numinous and the moral, and how belief in God combines both.

• 8. Indigo Lactarius. A blue fall mushroom that is easy to recognize, and edible, though one would hardly believe it.

• 9. The Wallace and Gromit animations. 1996. $22. There are at least three of these half-hour English animated films about a cheese-eating inventor and his dog. I found them oddly gripping in their mix of homely English ways and bizarre inventions, and very funny.

• 10. Making Saints: Inside the Vatican: Who Become Saints, Who do Not, and Why... by Kenneth Woodward, 1991. $11.20. Woodward is a journalist who interviewed Vatican insiders on the politics and theology of saint making.

• 11. Bob Vila's Toolbox, by Bob Vila, 1993. A book on portable hand and power tools-- not a how-to book, but a book on the tools themselves.

• 12. Lectures on Jonah , by Martin Luther, 1526. $22.99. Here one sees Luther not as polemicist, but as teacher, and as a good one, too.