LOS ANGELES — Attention last-minute holiday shoppers: We have an easy-to-purchase gift to recommend. And we guarantee that it will fit all sizes, shapes and tastes. This is assuming your intended recipients are intelligent, literate and eager to learn about the world.

The answer is to buy your friends a book on China — any book on China, or any two or even three books. You cannot go wrong. In the last year not one book on China has been published that's not worth buying and reading.

That's not because the best writers in the world are writing only about China. It's because China is a subject of such vast and profoundly important interest right now that it's virtually impossible to write a bad or useless book about the world's most populated nation/civilization, even if you try. The field of China books today is fiercely competitive.