The top ten books given in books

W.B. Gooderham is the author of Dedicated to...: The Forgotten Friendships, Hidden Stories and Lost Loves found in Second-hand Books, a book made up entirely of notes people have written in other books.

For the Guardian he tagged his ten favorite examples of book-giving in fiction, including:

The Son of the Wolf by Jack London. From Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov.

Poor Pnin. His life bumps gently along from one small failure to the next. Even the simple act of buying a Jack London novel for his ex-wife's visiting son, Victor, becomes yet another lesson in compromise and disappointment. Wanting a copy of Martin Eden, he is only able to find an old edition of London's lesser work The Son of the Wolf. "'I think I'm going to like this,' said polite Victor."

Read about the other entries on the list.

Pnin made Matthew Kaminski's list of the five best novels about immigrants in America, and Nabokov is on Ben Frederick's list of ten influential authors who came to the US as immigrants.

--Marshal Zeringue