Gift books for Christmas — reviewed by Marcus Berkmann

We have a fine crop of Christmas gift books this year, so good that some of them actually qualify as real books. This is a rare and beautiful thing.

What Cats Want (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is by Dr Yuki Hattori, billed here as ‘Japan’s leading cat doctor’, as though anyone is going to argue with that. It’s simply a guide to understanding your cat — clear, concise, very pleasingly designed and with some lovely, quintessentially Japanese illustrations, mainly of cats. Of course, if you don’t like cats it’s really not going to help you very much; but for those of us who are at least partially obsessed by these beautiful, mysterious, bird-butchering, bum-licking creatures who don’t think they are masters of the house, but know it for certain, this is a delightful and genuinely useful little book. The illustrations, by the way, are by the unfeasibly named Ito Hamster.

Word Perfect (John Murray, £14.99) is the latest volume from the ferocious production line of Susie Dent, logophile, lexicographer and long-time denizen of Dictionary Corner on TV’s Countdown. For reasons known only to her and her agent, Dent has ascribed an interesting, sometimes ludicrously obscure, word to each day of the year, which means that (including 29 February) there are 366 words discussed in this book. But she writes so entertainingly and well about them that the completely spurious nature of her project soon ceases to matter. I did know that ‘maverick’ was named after an American cattle rancher who refused to brand his calves and that ‘serendipity’ came from the Old Persian name for Sri Lanka. But I didn’t know that Victorians customarily referred to handkerchieves as ‘snottingers’, that ‘acid test’ had its origins in the 1848 California gold rush or that ‘lalochezia’ is a Greek word meaning the use of foul language to alleviate stress, unhappiness, pain or frustration.