As the global economy worsens and we need to squeeze every dollar till it shrieks, books become an even more desirable choice for gift-giving. This year's selection offers a couple of choices by local writers on subjects that could help us stretch the budget, while good novels and poetry will always provide a means to escape our worries. Now more than ever we need to support our local independent book stores and also keep the sales tax where it belongs – right here at home.

Mill Valley author Marsha Heckman ,whose beautifully produced books on flowers and weddings are perennial favorites, has gone in a new direction with the unique How to Cut Your Own Hair (or Anyone Else's!) (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, $16.95). Teaming with local hair stylists, her sisters Cathy Obiedo and Claudia Allin, Heckman writes, "This book will help you become even more self-sufficient than you already have to be in our fast paced and increasingly expensive world."

She believes that cutting your own and your family's hair can keep styles updated between regular appointments. You may even find that cutting your child's hair is enjoyable (she doesn't say anything about the knockout drops that would be required for any of the kids I know) and suggests saving time and money by learning how to trim your bangs or clean up your husband's neckline.

The book, which is cleverly constructed to stand alone for easy on-the-job reference, covers different methods of cutting bangs, and dealing with all types of hair--both male and female, long and short, straight or curly. Instructions seem clear and illustrations simple enough to be helpful. Things are enlivened with amusing quotes about our crowning glory. This is a gift for the adventurous.

A few hours of light reading can be a welcome respite in times of trouble and Terra Linda's prolific and award winning mystery writer Rhys Bowen provides just that for Anglophiles with A Royal Pain (Berkley Prime Crime, $23.95). The second in her Royal Spyness series (Bowen is also known for series' featuring Welsh policeman Constable Evans and also turn of the century New York charwoman Molly Murphy) this frothy concoction is set in 1930s London and stars Lady Georgiana, otherwise known as Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie of Glen Garry and Rannoch.

Georgie, as her friends call her, is second cousin to King George V and 34th in line to the throne of England. Uneducated, stony broke and in any case forbidden gainful employment, Georgie has become useful to Her Majesty the Queen in providing little services of subterfuge which seem to include the discovery of dead bodies. (She makes whatever money she can by doing light housework in disguise for aristocratic neighbors.)

In this installment, Queen Mary insists that Georgie play hostess to a Bavarian princess and her retinue as she is determined to get son Bertie's mind off a certain Mrs. Simpson. Of course the queen does not know that Georgie has no servants in her family's grand town house, nor any money to feed these visitors, and so the fun begins.

Social unrest is rife in this time just prior to World War II and Georgie and her house-party run up against communist agitators and fascist blackshirts as the bodies fall fast and furious. Satiric, witty, well plotted and full of sharply drawn characters, Bowen is getting in stride with A Royal Pain. The earlier book, Her Royal Spyness, is optioned for a movie; cozy mystery fans on your list will want to know about this series.

Ross poet Rebecca Foust has been the winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize for her book Dark Card (Texas Review Press). A former attorney, Foust rediscovered poetry in 2007 and has won acclaim for her cycle of 27 poems exploring themes related to raising a child with Asperger's Syndrome. Foust's son, now in his teens, suffers from this milder form of the autism disorder featured in the movie Rainman and the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Foust's work has been widely published for such a recent poet and deservedly so. There are echoes of Plath in her birth poems:

You, through the thicket
of green scrubs, splayed out
on the white butcher-papered table,
pale hair numbusing your blue
Gandhi face; the expansion
and dominion of silence.

She records the rage and the grief assailing any parent who has experienced the nightmare of a child's tragedy; the heartbreak of watching him abused by school yard kids, the frustration that others don't always get the specialness of the gifts he does have. Dark Card showcases Foust's considerable talents and readily walks the tightrope between the purely poetic and the easily accessible.

The Wednesday Sisters (Ballantine Books, $23) by Palo Alto author Meg Waite Clayton will be popular with female friends who like to cuddle up with what could be called historical chick lit. Set in late '60s Silicon Valley, the novel--it's actually a cut above chick lit of the shopping sort--features five women who find themselves meeting in a local park with their toddlers against a background of social change and unrest. Their husbands are for the most part well set for big-time careers in computers, medicine and scientific research.

Just as capable as the males, the women are as a matter of course on the unswerving mommy track, though feelings of discontent are beginning to fester. As political assassinations, anti-war demonstrations, and the beginnings of women's lib erupt in the unthinkable--bra-burnings--the five form a writer's group.

The annual Miss America contest forms a locus against which to judge their progress as they discover each other's secrets, support one another through marital problems and serious illness, and come to terms with their ingrained sexism and unthinking racism. Writing careers blossom with varying degrees of success; it all adds up to a satisfying read. If you actually were a young mother at that seminal time don't miss The Wednesday Sisters: it is astounding to realize how far we have come.

The students of Zen Buddhism who studied in the '60s and '70s with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi at the San Francisco Zen Center have proved to be a wonderfully talented and creative group of poets, writers and artists. Author Wendy Johnson is one of their number and Gardening at the Dragon's Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World (Bantam Books, $25) is her master work and a superb gift for long time gardeners as well as those just now taking it up in response to global warming, economic hardship and ecological concerns.

Johnson--a long time gardener at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, lay meditation teacher and founding member of California's food revolution is a lyrical fiery writer--whose knowledge and spirit, commitment and humor shine off the page. Gardening at the Dragon's Gate offers solid chapters on all aspects of gardening, each imbued with the Zen philosophy that lends itself so well to the cultivation of the land and the growing of fruit, flowers and vegetables.

Soil composition, the secrets of compost, watering how-to's, weeding, pruning, "Gardening With All Beings" (subtitled "Pest or Guest?"), plant diseases and much more can be found here. Johnson's knowledge and interest go far beyond horticulture, though that is wide and deep.

The reader enjoys the bonus of apposite quotations from many sources; poems; recipes, including a 500-year-old one for Leonardo da Vinci's pastels; menus; and interesting facts of every stripe. Nicely laid out and full of charming drawings by Davis te Selle, according to Johnson, the book's soft cover format is popular because it is "immediately affordable and ready to go out to the garden."

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