Gift books for college students—favorites from a fellow student’s Facebook list

As a college student home for the holidays, I master the art of procrastination. When not busy avoiding work (I’ve had a long semester!), I’ll sleep or watch On-Demand. Call my friends from my car. Drink cider. Send text messages during dinner. A week or two in, though, I become an early riser like everyone at home—put on my robe and drink coffee, acknowledge that it’s poor form to text when Grandma’s over. That’s when I pick up a good book like A Confederacy of Dunces. Here are some great gift books for college students—reads that spiced up winter days and made it onto my hallowed Facebook “Favorite Books” list:

• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe: Wolfe wrote this book in the mid-sixties, chronicling Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters and their transformation from darlings of the privileged class to far-out Bay Area hippies. (That Birkenstocked guy in your dorm who doesn’t shower is not a real hippie.) Read the book and then sit around feeling like a Goody Two-shoes.
• An Open Book, by John Huston: An autobiography of the director, this book begins in a Mexican jungle. Huston lived large during The Golden Age of Hollywood. With his playful sense of humor, he rocked dozens of films, several marriages, a rigged camel race in Reno, and finally retirement with his much-younger female caretaker outside Puerto Vallarta.
• Fail-Safe, by Eugene Burdick: Politics and danger are more your speed? This novel was published during the Cuban missile crisis, when Americans tiptoed and braced themselves for attack. Pregnant pause. Burdick puts a crew of American bombers on a beeline for Moscow, past the fail-safe point, leaving the War Room at the Pentagon tense and scrambling. Be a fly on the wall.
• A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole: Last but not least, this novel is as classic “college” as beirut and … parties. Maybe it’s the protagonist Ignatius’s life of excess or his self-righteous denial of his naïveté that resonates with the young and the restless. Whatever it is, grab the book, prop up your feet, put on a smug little smile, and enjoy the holidays.