CHRISTMAS STORIES

Once you’re done with the gifts and the food and every broadcast of “A Christmas Story” you can stand before you begin to hope that Ralphie does shoot his eye out, what’s left to do with that intermission between the holidays and New Year’s?

You can read.

It’s that one time of year when you will in fact have an afternoon to yourself. Nobody to be ferried to athletic practice, a host of other relatives to spirit folks to the movies, and a corner somewhere with lots of pillows, a sofa throw coated with cat hair and a gray treeless view — perfect reading weather.

A few years ago, Garrison Keillor, in an essay for the Land’s End catalog — when Land’s End had decided its future was in making its clothing the cottony accompaniment to radio fare such as “All Things Considered” — opined that around Christmas you don’t want to spend all your time speed-spending. You want to spend it brushing up on your Charles Dickens. It’s “Bleak House” weather.

So this holiday season, we’re opining about which books we want, and which we don’t, for gifts at the holidays.

Five categories of books I don’t want

- Any book about anybody’s epiphanic relationship with a dog or cat — but particularly a dog. If your dog has taught you the Great Truths of Life — namely, that it’s great not to have a job and to bask in the sun and squirrel hunt instead of watching really explicit talky stuff on HBO — have the decency to keep it to yourself.

And yes, I am looking at you, Anna Quindlen, author of “Good Dog. Stay.,” which clocks in at a whopping 82 tiny pages with big type. You’re probably going to be the one who drives Mitch Albom into The Dog Who Changed Me business, and after that we can just give up on the whole American literacy thing. People will stand in the bookstore line weeping over Albom’s dog while booksellers knock 20 percent off that Proust in the remainder bin.

- Any book by parents who marvel that they’re still cool even after they’ve had children. All parents think they’re still cool: It’s a mass delusion. All little kids say cute things (and they get over it when they’re teenagers, so go ahead and slap that smirk right off your face). All sleepdeprived parents have days when they’re so harried they almost forget to brush their teeth.

Chances are you have little to add to that richly cloying literary mix. Make a pan of brownies and start the cocktail hour before lunch. I guarantee you’ll not only feel better, but you’ll lose the urge to write it all down lest history be bereft.

- Any book by character actor John O’Hurley. I’m sorry you didn’t get that “Price Is Right” gig, John, because you would have been a stitch. But I don’t want your book, either.

- First-person bad behavior, or the Kathryn Harrison “I Slept With My Daddy Confessional.” If you were anorexic, manic, secretly wanted to kill your baby, were flamboyantly addicted to heroin or cheated on your Beatle husband with Eric Clapton, please stop talking about it now.

- Diet books, books that promise to reverse the aging process and all exercise books, aside from “Skinny Bitch.” “Skinny Bitch” is an entrancing whack job of a book, and I can’t understand a single nutritional concept contained therein, but it’s absolutely unforgettable on the subject of excretory habits and bean consumption. In “Skinny Bitch,” there are, God be praised, no recipes for salmon with pineapple mango salsa. God bless you, girls.

Five books I want for Christmas

- The collected poems of Wallace Stevens, because my well-thumbed copy has gone missing. It lived on my bedside table for years, next to all those books I meant to read — right below Honoré de Balzac’s “Le Père Goriot” and Wallace Stegner’s “Crossing to Safety” — and one day it just disappeared.

- A new John Irving or Michel Houellebecq. Why Chuck Palahniuk has a cult following and nobody knows Houellebecq absolutely boggles the mind. Houellebecq is far filthier, and his worldview is even grimmer. Read that scene in “The Elementary Particles” where the girlfriend meets a catastrophic sexual accident and tell me Palahniuk isn’t simply kicking himself that he didn’t get there first.

And for Irving, it’s simply a reader crush. From page one to the very end, I’m entranced every time.

- Anne Tyler’s “Ladder of Years.” I had a huge fight with one of my oldest friends over this one. How can a woman simply walk away from her family? “Ladder of Years” is not a splashy book. It’s just about a woman fed up and unable to remember that she was once someone far more interesting, and a serendipitous read during the season when the wife and mother is everybody’s magician. Go ahead, reinvent yourself. There’s always time to crank up that vacuum again.

- True crime books, including anything by Ann Rule. New this season is Life magazine’s “The Most Notorious Crimes in American History,” which conveniently reduces everybody from Lizzie Borden to Heidi Fleiss to O.J. Simpson to a few pages: it’s like People magazine was charged with reducing Charles Manson to a bitesize pumpkin tart.

MY FAVE FIVE OF ’07

1. “The World Without Us,” by Alan Weisman. What would happen if we — and by we, I mean the human, litterbox-changing, 30-year mortgage-holding inhabitants of Earth — simply vanished? Here’s a tidbit that should keep you humble: The thing that’s going to bring down your McMansion isn’t going to be rats or roaches or termites. It will be water.

2. “Leni,” by Steven Bach. Nobody lists Hitler’s filmmaker among his or her favorite directors of all time. But was she ever influential. Leni Riefenstahl started as a middling actress but found her calling as a director of the “come-to-Hitler” movies “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia.” She was also a lying, mean-spirited, sexually voracious, manipulative harridan who lived to be older than 100. Sadly, you couldn’t make her up.

3. “An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England,” by Brock Clarke. I loved it, and you failed to buy it in droves. But it’s still the funniest book of the year, and if you haven’t ponied up a few bucks to read about somebody else’s insufferable but unknowable family over those long nights when you’re stuck with your own insufferable but unknowable family, don’t ask me to feel sorry for you.

4. “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” by Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver will pry my bananas out of my cold dead hands, but she has me thinking more about how far my food has traveled to get into my filthy oven and my refrigerator, where the corpses of bad meals go to rot. A plea to eat more locally and save the planet.

5. “Boone: A Biography,” by Robert Morgan. You think you know Daniel Boone. You do not. And if you’re an American, you should.

THE WORST OF ’07

Here are five books I wouldn’t read even if every magazine in the doctor’s waiting room were coated with killer strep:

1. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” by J.K. Rowling. You know when there was that rumor that Harry was going to die? Happiest week of my summer.

2. “Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food,” by Jessica Seinfeld.

Two categories I never want to see together: Seinfeld. Food.

3. “The Weight Loss Cure ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About,” by Kevin Trudeau. The idiot writer “I” don’t want you to know about.

4. “Celebrity Detox,” by Rosie O’Donnell. When a card-carrying, Hubert Humphrey politics-of-joy liberal doesn’t want to read your book, what does that say about you?

5. “Christmas Letters from Hell,” by Michael Lent. The most horrendous book category ever: holiday humor.

CHERYL TRUMAN, McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS