Robin’s 2022 gift guide

I sent the first of these guides on a whim in 2020, and the reac­tion was so pos­i­tive that I resolved to keep sending them. Here is 2022’s edition.

My first dis­claimer, always, is that many rec­om­men­da­tions are repeated, year to year, because many things remain wonderful. I feel bad for the com­pilers of “proper” gift guides, e.g. on gadget web­sites, who have to go hunting every year for novelty. (Maybe they ought to rebel, and insist, “Last year’s Blue­tooth speaker remains PER­FECTLY WHOOMPHY!”)

My other dis­claimer is that this guide is totally U.S.-centric. Some of these items are avail­able in other countries, but I don’t know which ones exactly, so I’ll request your pardon, again, for my parochialism.

I believe con­sum­able gifts are the best gifts, so the guide is front-loaded with those. They are fol­lowed by durable goods and then, of course: BOOKS!

The introductory course

Of course I have to begin with this, or my strategem is for naught. Fat Gold, recall, is the small com­pany that I co-founded with Kathryn Tomajan. We pro­duce Cal­i­fornia extra virgin olive oil; in fact, I’m writing this newsletter in hours stolen from the olive harvest, still underway.

This year, for the first time, we’re offering a gift set, which com­bines a tin of our Stan­dard oil (bold and peppery) with a tin of our Blue oil (fragrant and fruity) and a 24-page recipe zine, which also includes a concise, com­pelling intro­duc­tion to extra virgin olive oil. The zine was printed on a Riso­graph by a tiny studio here in Oakland; long­time readers will under­stand how much I love this.

If you know someone who has expressed cau­tious interest in extra virgin olive oil, this is the gift for them. You can order anytime; the gift sets will all ship on December 15.

The graduate seminar

In Italy, olio nuovo is a tra­di­tional offering of the season: olive oil fresh from the mill, bot­tled while it’s still cloudy with little par­ti­cles of fruit and micro-droplets of water. This makes for an inter­esting flavor — it’s almost toothsome, like hazy beer — and also shortens the shelf life. Olio nuovo is for enjoying and using RIGHT NOW. Ideally, you’d glug it all before New Year’s Day.

Fat Gold doesn’t pro­duce an olio nuovo, so let me rec­om­mend instead the offering from ENZO Olive Oil Company, grown in the Cal­i­fornia’s San Joaquin Valley and milled just about … a week ago?! Yep, that’s new oil.

Beyond their olive oil, Enzo’s Table is a cornucopia. Their almond butter is the best I’ve ever had; likewise, they bake my favorite biscotti in the world.

The jam band

My friends at INNA Jam make the best jam in the country; one of them is also my band­mate in The Cotton Modules, so, yes, it’s all totally inter­twined over here.

Their flexible sub­scrip­tion makes a great ongoing gift. Not only is the jam itself sub­limely good, but it’s always pack­aged beau­ti­fully, so the whole expe­ri­ence is very fun and ceremonious. If a sub­scrip­tion is too much, con­sider a jar or three of their black mis­sion fig jam. Ina Garten is on the record saying it’s her favorite!

I want to spare a word, also, for their line of shrubs, which offer a fun, fes­tive alter­na­tive to booze for non-drinkers and/or young revelers. I was vis­iting a friend’s house recently, where each kid, ages 4-10, mer­rily pre­pared their own drink, first selecting a favorite flavor of shrub, then top­ping it with a float of sparkling water. “Those are some fancy kids,” I said to myself. Yes — and that’s some tasty shrub.

The wild one

Tart Vinegar is a small-batch vinegar pro­ducer with the spirit of an inde­pen­dent press and/or a punk band.

As an aes­thetic project, it’s bold and arresting, sin­gular and personal. As vinegar: it’s delicious! That’s a rare treat, when vibe matches quality.

My favorite, the Ocean Vinegar, is cur­rently sold out. You should watch for its reappearance; made from kombu, bladderwrack, and Irish sea moss, it’s some­thing really special. In the meantime, you can try vine­gars as var­ious as Celery, Lavender, and Sumac.

Sumac!!

The salt upgrade

Daybreak Sea­weed Company’s sea­weed salt is my daily staple.

Nearly every morning, I make toast (Josey Baker’s Whole Grain Wonder Bread) and slather it with peanut butter (crunchy) then splash that with olive oil (Fat Gold) and top the whole pro­duc­tion with a gen­erous sprinkle of Daybreak’s sea­weed salt.

This pro­vides my fuel for most of the day, and, indeed, most of my work. If you have ever read any­thing I’ve written and thought, “Well, I enjoyed that,” thank the peanut butter, and the olive oil, and the sea­weed salt.

Plain salt, even the fancy flaky kind, is no longer sufficient. If I were a Roman soldier, you’d have to pay me in this.

The chile revolutionaries

The cul­ti­va­tion and pre­sen­ta­tion of chiles by Boonville Barn Col­lec­tive has been, for me, a revolution. I am now a true believer; a zealot. I hon­estly didn’t know chiles could taste this good! Fresh fruiti­ness and savory depth and a fine, clear heat; the unde­ni­able sense of sun­shine cap­tured in phys­ical form.

I’ve men­tioned before that I am obsessed with their whole dried chiles, e.g. these cas­ca­bels from 2021. (Keep an eye out for the new ancho chiles when they come online … ) I also rec­om­mend their poblano chile powder and their smoky Piment d’Ville. Their Calabrian chile flakes are sold out, but those are obvi­ously a must-have when they reappear.

Some amount (dash, pinch, avalanche) of some Boonville Barn Col­lec­tive product (powder, flake, whole chile) makes its way into nearly every­thing I cook, and I just don’t know why you’d choose to live any other way. (That’s the zealot talking.)

The magic bag

This is a pricy rec­om­mendation; I acknowl­edge that. But, some people are in the market for pricy rec­om­men­da­tions; some people, furthermore, are in the market for items that might last a lifetime. I haven’t owned my Tsuchiya Kaban bag for a lifetime, only about a year, but already, I can report that it is one of my favorite things I’ve ever purchased.

It’s the kind of product that a pic­ture doesn’t really capture, because so much of its appeal is the spe­cific feel, the spe­cific smell. None of that was apparent when I ordered this bag, of course; I could only stare at the pic­tures online (for weeks, calculating, amortizing); so, when it arrived, this extra layer of sen­sory pleasure, this mate­rial reality, hit like a rogue wave out of nowhere. I was done for, the moment I opened the box.

This com­pany has a LOT of offerings, and a lot of them aren’t for me. I find myself mag­ne­tized by their Tone Oil­nume line, to which this bag belongs; the tex­ture is amazing. I got a wallet to tuck inside — I am going to acknowl­edge again, this stuff is not cheap!! — and I’m glad I did.

People talk, sometimes, about the aura of craft; the feeling you get from an object that its maker really cared about. If such an aura exists — and I believe it does — Tsuchiya Kaban’s prod­ucts are incan­des­cent with it.

The happy scrubber

For years, I used a long-handled plastic brush to scrub dishes and scour pans. It was cheap and charmless, and the angle of the handle was somehow always wrong. This brush made me slightly angry every time I used it.

I finally got wise and dis­carded that brush, replacing it with a couple of these bristly dudes from Jinen, the great Japanophile emporium. Like the old brush, they are cheap; unlike the old brush, they are fun and inter­esting. Using them makes me happy, not angry.

Take some time to explore Jinen’s offerings; I guar­antee you’ll find a trea­sure or three. The Hibi incense matches are wonderful.

The unlikely gadget

This is one of those gad­gets that seems like it should be good in theory, a dis­aster in practice. Here’s the twist: it really works!

The Remington HKVAC2000C, with its BUILT-IN VACUUM, sort of changed my life. I keep my hair buzzed short, head and beard alike. Main­te­nance is just a quick ses­sion with a clipper every week or so. Historically, this meant an explo­sion of tiny hair clippings. Of course, I tried my best to clean up; of course, I always missed some. Thus, I left behind a dusting of annoying evidence; thus, I became a monster. I was tired of being a monster.

As a hair clipper, this gadget is exactly average. As a gift — really, a great courtesy — to the other people in your household, and/or your future self … it is unprecedented.

The praise magnet

I was torn on including this; more than any of my other rec­om­men­da­tions, it feels like sur­rending a secret. That’s absurd, of course: this over­shirt was adver­tised to me on Instagram. And yet! And yet. It has gen­er­ated more com­pli­ments, more steadily, than any article of clothing I have ever owned.

Wax London’s over­shirts are mildly premium-priced, but hon­estly, the expense-to-praise ratio is very, very favorable. There are many col­or­ways to choose from; I do not know if they all gen­erate com­pli­ments at the same rate.

The whole thing is pleas­antly mysterious, because the over­shirt does not, to me, seem that remarkable. In fact, after I received it, I thought I’d prob­ably return it; buuut I forgot about it, and the return window closed … you know how it goes. Then, when I wore it into the world, I was buf­feted with praise; incredible. It keeps happening. My instincts are all wrong, and this over­shirt is all right.

It would make a good gift for someone who appre­ci­ates a nice piece of light out­er­wear and could, perhaps, use a few more com­pli­ments in their life.

The books of the year

These two novels were, for me, the books of the year. I truly think any fic­tion reader will love at least one of them.

Ray Nayler’s The Moun­tain in the Sea is the great near-future sci­ence fic­tion novel. It is inter­ested in dif­ferent kinds of minds — ALL the dif­ferent kinds. There are octo­puses in these pages, and androids, and a baleful silent AI ship cap­tain that is, for me, the most potent vil­lain to appear in any medium in years.

It’s worth buying this novel in print, in part, for the beau­ti­fully ren­dered glyphs that rep­re­sent a nascent octopus language. I don’t want to say too much more, because dis­cov­ering them — decoding them! — is part of the fun. I just want to affirm that this book, like most of MCD’s publications, really earns its phys­icality.

Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow tracks a deep cre­ative rela­tion­ship over decades; it is, in that sense, a pro­fes­sional love story, and why don’t we have more of those?

There are pro­fes­sional love sto­ries behind so many of the things we enjoy most — our favorite movies, or musicals, or video games. The latter pro­vides the milieu for this novel, but it’s impor­tant to say that even if you’ve never played a video game — even if you find them totally cryptic — there is still so much waiting for you in this novel that is real and wise and human.

And, hey, maybe it’ll get you into video games!

I found this novel’s moments of tri­umph totally electric, phys­ically thrilling; some of its other moments, one in particular, made me cry.

The unproblematic fave

I have fond, intense mem­o­ries of reading, and rereading, and reading again the children’s pic­ture book by Peter Spier titled simply: People.

It belongs to a genre that was always catnip to me: encyclopedic, with each spread of pages offering dozens of tiny, detailed draw­ings to pore over. Spier drew bodies; he drew eyes; noses; houses; hobbies. He drew so many of the things that make us who we are.

A book about human dif­fer­ence orig­i­nally pub­lished in 1980 does not necessarily sound like some­thing that would stand the test of time. It is a tes­ta­ment to how totally ahead of the curve Peter Spier was — or, perhaps, to the dura­bility of sincere curiosity — that People remains, in 2022, totally unproblematic.

This book would make a great gift for any child in your life. I believe that it had a seri­ously con­struc­tive effect on me, though of course I didn’t under­stand at the time just how impres­sive it was. I just loved looking at the draw­ings — SO many draw­ings — of human vari­a­tion and inven­tion in all its forms.

As I write this, and remember how much time I spent with this book, I’m tearing up a little bit. Peter Spier died in 2017. What a contribution.

The surprise factory

I’m an intense fan of Hayao Miyazaki, the guiding force behind Studio Ghibli films like My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. I have, therefore, already acquired two copies of Shuna’s Journey, his early manga just pub­lished in Eng­lish for the first time — one as a gift, the other for myself.

You can order Shuna’s Journey from 50 Watts Books. While you’re there, you might also order:

• A Dic­tio­nary of Color Combinations, a volume both lovely AND useful. I have legit­i­mately con­sulted it many times, designing all sorts of things.

• Manhoru by Thomas Couderc, the book of Japanese man­hole covers. If you’re not familiar with this form of artistry, you must go take a peek.

• Emile: The Helpful Octopus by Tomi Ungerer. Pairs well with The Moun­tain in the Sea.

• The Night Life of Trees by Bhajju Shyam, Durga Bai, and Ram­s­ingh Urveti, one of those rel­a­tively rare books printed in “dark mode”.

• Rainbow Goblins by Ul de Rico, which I praised in last year’s gift guide for its liquid beauty and deep weirdness. “Isn’t this what a children’s book is sup­posed to do? Plant a little bomb with a slow fuse that will go off unpre­dictably at some point in the future?”

• Any one of these pic­ture books—I mean, just look at them!

50 Watts Books is THE source online for books that are beau­tiful and surprising; books you didn’t know you ought to be looking for, because who could imagine there might exist a book in which every page is just a gor­geous close-up photo of rock, richly col­ored and tex­tured?

(Yes, I bought that one.)

The new editions

I’ve hooted about these for months, so I’ll keep it short. I don’t need much space, anyway; my case is airtight. These books

• are lovely, affordable paperbacks;
• inhabit a shared fictional milieu, the hyperreal Penumbraverse; and they
• GLOW IN THE DARK!!

You see? It has the inevitability of a math­e­mat­ical proof. Call up your local bookstore, say you’d like to get the two Sloan novels. Make sure they are these new editions, pub­lished in 2022.

That con­cludes this year’s gift guide! Thanks, as always, for fol­lowing along.

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. I’ll be back on December 7 with another proper newsletter.

November 2022