Books are gifts for others and ourselves—escapes always at hand. Newsweek staff share their favorites to enjoy or give this year.

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein paints the Creature as a sensitive and sympathetic soul, and Mike Carey's Once-Was-Willem ...

The clarity and simplicity of these themes is a strength of the book, as is the frequent use of diagrams to illustrate them.

THE COLONIAL AGENTS—Dr. Ellla Lonn—University of North Carolina Press ($5). Twenty years ago, when Ella Lonn’s career as a scholar had barely begun, she lived in a boardinghouse in Bloomsbury, lunched ...