It will please me if you take the advice of one or more of the nine book lovers whose proposals for holiday reading appear on these pages. Both reading and being read to aloud can be a wonderfully nourishing intimacy -- drawing people together in a connection that is intense.

I have known at least one person who could -- and did -- recite from memory every one of the roughly 2,500 words of O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi," long an American favorite, which is recommended again today by Paul Duke. But, fond as I am of good theater, I believe reading is stronger than reciting. There is a powerful continuum in taking a thing from page to eye to mind to lips to ear to mind to heart.

One of the most instructive and entertaining examinations of the reading-aloud question that I have ever read is a long section in Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (Viking / Penguin, 1997, 372 pages, $16 paperback), which I just went back to. I was struck again not only by the coincident scholarliness and clarity of Manguel's work, but by a core observation of his on reading aloud. "The primordial languages of the Bible," he writes, "Aramaic and Hebrew do not differentiate between the act of reading and the act of speaking; they name both with the same word."

Almost annually, I find myself declaring why we do not publish holiday roundups and gift-suggestion lists of books on these pages. I believe personal choices of books are far too mysterious a matter to dictate to without condescension. You will do far better spending an hour or two wandering around in a good book shop -- on behalf of yourself or of anyone you know intimately enough to give a book to -- than by reading all of the lists in every periodical.

So, insisting it doesn't constitute a gift-anxiety panacea, here are the eight books that I found myself most moved or fascinated by in the past year -- the most recent first:

John Updike's 20th novel, Seek My Face (Knopf, 288 pages, $23) is a crisp but elegant tale of a single day in which a 78-year-old artist is interviewed by a sometimes hostile, sometimes arrogant, sometimes obsequious young journalist seeking to do a profile of the artist -- but actually probing her experiences with her three husbands. One spouse is drawn unapologetically from the life and works of Jackson Pollock. The second is patterned more broadly on Andy Warhol. The book is a deeply insightful examination of a person of intelligence and sensitivity, whose reflections on life make memorable reading. It is equally a brilliantly provocative look at postmodern art.

To America: Personal Reflections of a Historian, by Stephen Ambrose (Simon and Schuster, 288 pages, $24). Ambrose, one of the United States' premier historians, died at 66, on Oct. 13. He worked on this book almost to his final day. It is anecdotal, self-examining, often celebratory. Ambrose loved life, America, history and stories with perhaps identical passion. All those qualities speak from almost every page.

Terry Teachout's book, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (HarperCollins, 441 pages, $29.95) was of particular pleasure to me because Teachout has been an admired friend since well before he began researching the Sage of Baltimore 10 years ago. He concludes that Mencken, for all his appallingly unattractive attitudes and proclivities, was to the 20th century what Mark Twain was to the 19th: Simply the most important recorder of American culture and character. This is now the Mencken life.

Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces, by Wislawa Szymborska (Harcourt, 256 pages, $24). Szymborska, now 80 and active, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996 for her poetry. This collection of short personal columns written for Poland's most influential newspaper is astonishing. Mostly reflections or sketches that were precipitated by a book or more, they are cheerful, courageous, shimmering essays on life and the capacity to survive and to find joy.

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, by Martin Amis (Talk Miramax, 306 pages, $24.95) is the most succinct and yet persuasive study of the horror of modern totalitarianism I have read. Koba was the nickname Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvilis picked for himself when he was he was an adolescent. When he grew up, he renamed himself Stalin. And he ordered and oversaw depravities of tyranny that slaughtered or starved more than 40 million people. (The 20 million of the title is irony, a minimal claim.) Beyond that, this book is a historically important examination of how the bloodiest butcher in history won the support of many British and American intellectuals.

Dig Infinity! The Life and Art of Lord Buckley, by Oliver Trager (Welcome Rain, 405 pages, $30) is a book that is accompanied by a compact disk. The CD amplifies the superb biography, interweaving tapes of interviews with recordings of some of Buckley's performance pieces. In the late 1950s, I was an almost adulating enthusiast for Lord Buckley, an inimitable comic artist and social critic, who died 42 years ago. Among his fans were Robin Williams, Ed Sullivan, Ken Kesey (who said he knew every one of Buckley's records by heart), Jerry Garcia, James Coburn, Henry Miller, Jimmy Buffett, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. David Amram, the composer and conductor, said of Buckley "for many of us, he was a combination of Walt Whitman, Charlie Parker, Baudelaire, and Laurence Olivier." This book does him justice.

In Spies (Metropolitan, 261 pages, $23), Michael Frayn confronts the raw moral certainty of 10-year-olds against the sophisticated, well-intentioned efforts of parents and others of their generation. Frayn, at 68, is one of the great writers working in English. This is a delicately nuanced yet searingly moral exploration of the enigma I think of as the inhumanity of innocence. A beautiful, troubling novel.

Ian McEwan's Atonement (Doubleday, 448 pages, $26), is a novel of immense power and artistry, confirming -- if confirmation were needed -- McEwan's status as one of the major writers of the present generation. The narrative sweeps from 1935 to 1999, lushly and often painfully using the frames of the Depression, of World War II and its worst impact on England, and finally of the retrospective insights of a 77-year-old. A brilliant and fascinating story of the deepest of human values and vulnerabilities.

Happy holidays -- and happy reading!