In this season of tight wallets and open hearts, it might be wise to choose holiday gifts that will stay around for a while. And who better to turn to for reliably stirring seasonal picks than your trusty independent bookseller?

This year, the booksellers reach into their shelves and pull out tomes on a wide range of weighty topics, from a family in mourning in Jonathan Topper's This Is Where I Leave You to a Nigerian girl, re-building a family under duress, in Little Bee. Other selections are heavy simply by virtue of their page count: the four-volume collection of Paris Review Interviews packs 50 years of conversations with some of our greatest writers into some 2000 pages. Which should just about keep the book lover on your list occupied until next year.

LOGICOMIX: Despite the title, Logicomix is more accurately a graphic novel, not an old fashioned comic book. A journey with Nobel Literature Prize-winner Bertrand Russell during his lifelong quest to find logic in mathematics, the book's art, by Alecos Papadatos and Annie DiDonna, is exquisitely rendered in full color. To compare it to a classic Archie and Veronica-style comic would be as unfair as comparing a Rembrandt to a child's refrigerator drawing (unless of course it's your child).

And the subject matter is complex enough that it really helps to have pictures tell part of the story. They allow the authors to rely primarily on words to explain the math and philosophy, and on pictures to help describe people and events. To provide a break from contemplating logic and mathematical theorems, the authors insert themselves as characters in the story, and the artists oblige with drawings that look very much like all four collaborators. (See the authors depict themselves grappling with Russell's response to World War II.)

Read full list on the NPR website.