Each year in writing this column, I have recommended books for Christmas gifts. This year is no different.

First has to be “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” This publishing phenomenon was concluded as we all expected, Harry surviving, but J.K. Rowling kept the suspense until the very end. If you have not completed the series, finish it. If you have a kid or grandkid who has not, give them the books. Don’t wait for the movies.

Several other recommendations do come from recent movies. “The Golden Compass” is the first of a well written trilogy by Philip Pullman in which a young girl must save interconnected worlds, including the Earth. The other two books in the series are “The Subtle Knife” and “The Amber Spyglass.”

“Beowulf” makes for another interesting contrast in media. I can assure you that Grendel’s mother in the original Old English looked nothing like Angelina Jolie. Read Seamus Heaney’s translation. It is marvelous. I can also recommend the audiobook, recited by Heaney.

If you want to work on your Old English, Howell D. Chickering has a dual language version of “Beowulf,” Old English on one page, English on the facing page, and with excellent notes. If you want to read Grendel’s side of the fight, check out John Gardner’s “Grendel,” where the author turns the monster into an existential hero.

For kids’ books I have only two recommendations, as this newspaper has been running a series on kids’ books this year. Jan Pienkowski’s book, “ABC Dinosaurs,” combines alphabet practice with pop-up dinosaurs.

Kids can see a brachiosaurus lay an egg and iquanadon babies hatch as pages are turned. A mosasaurus swims as it eats, and kronosaurus jaws can paper pinch fingers. Pterodactyls fly off the page, and, of course, T-Rex munches on a stegosaurus. Be careful with pop-up books, please; they tear easily.

Jan Brett’s “The Three Snow Bears” puts the Goldilocks story into Inuit territory. Aloo-ki invades the polar bears’ igloo and tastes their cooling soup, tries on mukluks, and then falls asleep under warm fur. She wakes up staring at three bear noses inches away. The book is full of Inuit designs with vignettes showing polar animals dressed up in native clothing.

“The Wall” by Peter Sis is advertised as a children’s book, but I disagree. Sis grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia, and his book is a chilling depiction of what censorship, spies, and totalitarianism can do to a country.

Drawn as a series of rectangular frames, his life story progresses with small dabs of color, usually red, through Stalinism, five year plans, and the Prague Spring of Alexander Dubcek in 1968. For a short time the Beatles, Alan Ginsberg, the Harlem Globetrotters and color were allowed in the country.

Sis’s metaphor in “The Wall” uses the actual Iron Curtain wall as a blank slate, painted in colors with dreams of freedom, then erased by the police, painted again, erased, painted … until on Nov. 9, 1989, the wall fell.

If you want light reading I can recommend Michael Chabon’s latest book, “Gentlemen of the Road.” It seems to be a mixture of Easy Rider set in a tale based upon Sheherazade written by Kipling about men who wish to be kings. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. could play one of the roles with Morgan Freeman in the other.

“Can’t You Hear the Whistle Blowin’” is by Bill Lansing, local amateur historian. Subtitled, “Logs, Lignite, and Locomotives in Coos County, Oregon,” Lansing’s book has many old photographs from local and state-wide resources about logging and mining using oxen, trains, and boats.

Lansing has the wherewithal and patience to turn out marvelously detailed books of coastal history. His book is even more pertinent today as it has a a detailed description of the building of the current railroad through nine separate tunnels and across the Siuslaw River six times. The first train arrived in the Coos Bay area in August 1916, and now the line may be extinct.

Last in this list is a book you can not get yet. “The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabbler” by local author, Emmy winning Jeff Whitty, will not be available until Dec. 31. That doesn’t matter, though. The play has been selected to be part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland in 2008.

Described in the festival brochure, available at the Coos Bay Public Library, as a “mind-bending and riotously funny comedy,” “Adventures” promises to be quirky and challenging on the stage with “strong language, mature themes.” Good.

However, it would help that before all of the Bay Area treks to Ashland next summer to see what this favorite son has written, read the original play, “Hedda Gabbler,” by Henrik Ibsen. I’m looking forward to the contrast between the two plays and to how Whitty has used Hedda to comment on today.