You have to admit it: you’ve received bigger holiday gifts, and flashier holiday gifts, but often the one you like best, when you’re looking for a little peace after all of the high-decibel socializing, is the book you were given. Here are a few ideas that may save both shopper and shoppee some costly seasonal headaches.

For the friend of the downtrodden
It’s easy to cheer for the underdog—unless the underdog is an awful movie that cancels two hours of your life. We’re not talking about lovable losers like Plan 9 From Outer Space or Showgirls. We’re talking about baffling delusions like Ishtar, Under the Cherry Moon, and The Love Guru. One of the best ways of making up for time lost to these palookas is to read Nathan Rabin’s funny and insightful new book, My Year of Flops (Scribner). Rabin collects 35 pieces from his popular A.V. Club column, each one marvelling at a cinematic washout, from Cameron Crowe’s mewling Elizabethtown to John Travolta’s cosmic error Battlefield Earth. Rabin adds 15 all-new essays to the mix, as well as interviews with some of the people responsible. For all of the fun he has with Gigli or Bratz: The Movie, this self-declared “failure junkie” isn’t out to kick a film when it’s down, but rather to show his “solidarity with misfits, outsiders, and underachievers”.

In the same spirit comes acclaimed novelist Jonathan Lethem’s pocket-sized paperback They Live (Soft Skull Press), an extended essay on John Carpenter’s oft-maligned 1988 sci-fi movie of the same name. I know what you’re thinking: how could anyone scoff at a film that stars pro-wrestling legend “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and depicts Reagan-era consumerism as a mind-control experiment run by ghoulish space aliens disguised as average Americans? But many people have indeed scoffed over the years (at least, they looked like people). Lethem is having none of it, though, and uncovers the deeper meanings of They Live in everything from its garbled politics to the stunningly weird six-minute fistfight in the middle of the proceedings. Much of the discussion is time-coded to sync up with your DVD copy of this classic, ’80s-soaked blend of action-hero cheese and suffocating paranoia.

For those who like their history served fresh
New York City historian and biographer Stacy Schiff won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), her portrait of a gifted, highly accomplished woman who was eclipsed by her famous husband. Now, with Cleopatra: A Life (Little, Brown), Schiff turns her eye to another formidable woman, but one whose name has echoed across millenniums. Once again, Schiff’s goal is to dig through layers of myth. Forget Shakespeare, forget Liz Taylor: this meticulously researched vision throws aside centuries of notoriety and distorted legend to reveal a fiercely intelligent, fully human monarch who ruled in an era of great wealth, learning, and violence.

For those with an eye for the shape of things to come
Just as the Arctic climate has shifted, the work of Inuit artists has continually evolved in response to the industrialized, bureaucratic culture encroaching from the south. Inuit Modern (Douglas & McIntyre), an opulent new coffee-table book, displays the astonishing results. The 175 pieces beautifully reproduced here span the last century. The burnished, fluid human shapes of Akeeaktashuk’s stone-and-ivory carvings, dated “before 1954”, stand in stark contrast to the abstract, hauntingly spare forms created by John Pangnark in the 1960s and ’70s. Forty-year-old drawings crowded with animals and spirits sit alongside sharp-lined, deceptively straightforward renderings of 21st-century routines in living rooms and kitchens. As editor and curator Gerald McMaster notes in his introductory essay, “The push back—the resistance and resilience that characterize Inuit culture—has always been reflected in the creation and production of art.”¦they have stayed put and let the South come to them; in so doing, it is we who change when we go North.”

As if charting a universe bizarrely parallel to this one, the colourful large-format book I Am Plastic, Too (Kidrobot) samples the remarkable work of another creative culture fascinated by hybrids and flipped conventions. Through artist interviews and glossy illustrations, author Paul Budnitz puts together his second survey of the international designer-toy movement—toy here referring not to a child’s plaything but to a limited-edition figurine made of hard vinyl, intricately painted, and hunted by collectors around the world. The form, which arose 15 years ago in Hong Kong and Tokyo, is a collision of pop-culture kitsch and riotous imagination, resulting in straitjacket-wearing bunny rabbits and bloodstained, cigarette-smoking teddy bears. One pudgy figure is decorated with camouflage and has an aerosol-can cap for a head; another is painted entirely as Swiss cheese and carries a grater. It’s a marriage of Disney and Dali, spawning a truly global subculture.

For those who like a story with their song
With its 800-plus pages of double-columned text, Will Friedwald’s A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers (Pantheon) seems like one of those bone-dry reference volumes that look good on a shelf but are best left unread. It’s anything but, however. Friedwald, a music writer for the Wall Street Journal, spent a decade assembling this massive overview of iconic vocalists, and he’s not afraid to make his deeply informed personal opinions known, whether the subject is Billie Holiday or Hank Williams, the Andrews Sisters or Bob Dylan. If you’re just looking for the bare facts, go to Wikipedia. This is a work to get lost in, a grand alphabetized tour of an entire musical world.

Of course, it’s a tour that leaves aside hip-hop, arguably the most important vocal form of recent decades. Luckily, Jay-Z’s stunning hardback Decoded (Spiegel & Grau) has just arrived. Playing off inventive page layout and illustrations, the legendary MC sets out a mix of hard-edged memoir, social analysis of African-American life, and musical insight. Fans will be especially interested in the annotated lyrics that appear at regular intervals. It’s a stylish attempt to show, as the author puts it, “how hip-hop created a way to take a very specific and powerful experience and turn it into a story that everyone in the world could feel and relate to”.