If you are one of those non-readers who insist on buying books for your bookworm friends, my advice would be don’t buy anything with a poultry recipe in the title, unless it is an actual cookbook about making soup.Every year bookworms rip open their Christmas gifts only to find exactly the book they didn’t want. Books so hideous you couldn’t even put them next to the toilet to be read during moments of extreme boredom.One helpful way to figure out what a bookworm really wants is to go to their wish list on Amazon. The wish list is open to public viewing. Just go to amazon.com, click on wish lists, and type the person’s name or e-mail into the search box you can always print out the list and then take it to a local book store. Failing that, here are some of this year’s hottest books, local and international.One of the most coveted Bermuda books this season will probably be Jonathan Smith’s ‘In The Hour of Victory’. The former Police Commissioner and Government Senator put together letters from his grandfather Major Anthony F Smith.Major Smith wrote the letters to his wife, Faith, during the Second World War while he was serving overseas as a member of the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps attached to the Lincolnshire Regiment.Based on his original 300 letters, cards and telegrams, and additional research, the story is far more than just an account of war, dealing with Smith’s love for his wife and five children, how much he despised the Nazis and how he was driven to defend, as he... put it, ‘my King and Country.’One of twelve children, five of whom saw active military duties in two World Wars, Major Smith survived a U-boat attack and spent several years in the UK before finally seeing active combat. Meanwhile, his wife and five young children struggled to make ends meet during the war and Major Smith was constantly and sometimes heart-wrenchingly torn between his loyalty to his family and the battle against the Nazis.The story, told for the first time in full, takes the reader through emotional highs and lows and is an incredibly detailed account with an ending few could predict.Not only is the book a highly personal account, there are descriptions of bomb ravaged London, war analysis, personal vignettes as well as critical commentary of social and business life in Bermuda and the UK during the war years.Major Smith was killed in action in Overloon Holland on October 14, 1944 as the Allies continued their advance into Germany.Another top choice this Christmas might be Graham Foster’s ‘Hall of History’. This is a large (and heavy) coffee table book detailing the mural Mr Foster made of Bermuda history at The Commissioner’s House in Dockyard.The mural illustrates Bermuda’s history from its earliest days in the 1600s to modern times and took Mr Foster several years to complete.Readers and art lovers will spend hours poring over the pages of this book because it enlarges many interesting features of the mural that you might have missed, and gives you some written insight into them.This is also a great book for children although it may be too heavy for them to lift. Children and adults will find all the quirky details quite engrossing.