Holiday Guide 2009: Find the perfect books—both new and old—for your hipster niece (and your Yankee neighbor, and your brother the foodie...)

OK, troops. Shut off those Kindles, and get your lily-livered asses down to Davis-Kidd for some one-stop get'r done holiday book shopping. Yours is not to reason why, yours is but to whip out that debit card and buy:

For Your Hipster Niece: Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists, by the writers of The Onion. Imagine the joy on your little Suicide Girl's face when she unwraps this guide to postmodern American life, which features an epic forward by Chuck Klosterman and contributions by the likes of John Hodgman and Amy Sedaris.

For Your New Neighbor From the North: The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor. No one gets what's right, and wrong, about "the long green hinterland that is Tennessee" better than Taylor (1917-1994), whose crystalline prose and grasp of mid-Southern melancholy place him in the pantheon of American short story writers. For Your UT Football-Loving Brother-In-Law: On Rocky Top by Clay Travis. When Travis, an attorney, sportswriter and lifetime UT football fan, got to cover his heroes, he had no idea he'd witness the worst season in the program's 110-year history. But Travis spins the disappointing 2008 season into gold with this account of the mercenary world of college athletics.

For Wanna-Be Rock Stars: True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass: Jimmy Martin by Tom Piazza. Unlike tight-asses Ralph Stanley and Bill Monroe, Martin was a loose cannon who could go beer for beer with anyone in rock 'n' roll. Piazza's account of a harrowing night at the Opry with the drunken guitarist is a primer in bad behavior. For Lousy Drivers: Traffic—Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt.We drive like we brush our teeth—automatically—but Vanderbilt shows that negotiating the I-24/I-65 split has implications for human behavior behind the wheel and beyond.

For Fans of Bollywood, Yoga, Palak Paneer and All Things Indian: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. A tale of Indian entrepreneurialism gone awry, Adiga's book features an oppressive nation that's far removed from the patchouli-scented image sold to the West in Bollywood epics and self-help books.

For Mystery Fans: A Game For the Living by Patricia Highsmith. Highsmith is known for trapping her characters in a web of their own dualities. In A Game For the Living (1958), she transcends the mystery genre with a story of two unlikely friends, one of whom might have murdered a woman they once shared.

For Romantic Fiction Fans: Too Good to be True by Kristan Higgins. Higgins' well-rounded characters avoid the lechery that's cliché in contemporary romance writing. Here, a woman known for inventing fictional lovers creates one just like her neighbor—who, it turns out, has an unsavory past.

For Your Brother the Foodie: The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky. No bivalve-lover's holiday is complete without this tome, which connects the history of New York with that of its once famous export. Like Kurlansky's other social histories, Salt and Cod, The Big Oyster is a commentary on industrial food production.

For Your Dad the History Buff: Strange Ground: An Oral History of Americans In Vietnam 1945-1975 by Harry Maurer. For those who weren't there, this collection of 67 first-hand accounts is as close to American-occupied, bizarro-world Vietnam as you're going to get. From disenfranchised grunts to gung-ho generals, Maurer's compilation has implications that cut straight to the heart of current State Department squabbles.