Sunday’s Times Book Review included the Children’s Books section, which always precedes the holidays, and which I look forward to every year. Besides being the usual good read for lovers of children’s books, it’s an ideal shopping guide for the aunt, parent or friend who does all of her holiday shopping for the younger set at the bookstore. I was a book-obsessed child, and the flat packages that meant hours of vacation pleasure to me were what I most wanted to find under the tree. I give books for the simple reason that I love books, but unless a child has a favorite series (and doesn’t yet possess them all), it’s tough to book-shop for kids past the picture-book age and feel reasonably confident in your chances of success.

That’s where the Book Review comes in. Unless you have an unusually precocious bookophile on your hands, the young reader isn’t likely to have picked up the books based on the reviews, and books new enough to make its pages probably haven’t yet been passed around or entered the list of what librarians most recommend. I already know which high school junior on my list will receive “The Future of Us,” Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler’s story of two 1996 teens who find themselves able to view, and change, the Facebook pages of their older selves. I’ll look at “Seriously, Norman!” for my own 10-year-old son, because Meg Wolitzer’s review suggests a frequently illustrated story of magical realism, too complex to summarize but involving a failed test, an oddball tutor and at least one scatological joke that a boy who favors Harry Potter and Roald Dahl might appreciate. There are books for middle-grade fans of anthropomorphized mice, and a new entry, much lauded, into the teen-dystopian-fantasy genre that would be perfect for the high schooler still rereading “The Hunger Games.”

WIthout a new Book Review to guide me, my usual strategy when shopping for chapter books is to buy books that I loved when I was young, but that never quite reached the iconic stature of Ramona, Anne and Laura-and-Mary and so might still be undiscovered. I’ve given many a copy of “Betsy-Tacy” (and “Swallows and Amazons,” and “The Saturdays,” and oh, I could go on), but I think I’ll be judicious with “The Betsy-Tacy Treasury” (with forewords by Judy Blume, Ann M. Martin and Johanna Hurwitz). A real reader might be thrilled by its thickness, and the promise that a newly loved story won’t end too soon, but a child new to successful reading of “real books” (the perfect audience for Betsy and Tacy) could easily be intimidated. For her, the paperback. For me, on the other hand, “The Betsy-Tacy Treasury” is a must-have.

Buying picture books seems easy when compared with choosing a book for a picky teen, but while nearly any picture book may be happily received by the child (who’s gone on to playing with the wrapping paper anyway), the real goal is to please the parents, with a book they’ll read aloud, and enjoy reading, often. You can choose among boys with superhero alter egos, alphabet books, or books about “unusual animals,” feeling fairly safe that you haven’t given the kind of thing that will, ahem, accidentally fall back between the couch and the wall. Finally, Marjorie Ingall has reviewed three picture books portraying children living through tough times (the Depression, and escapes from both Nazis and Castro’s Cuba) in stories simple enough for other children to understand. All are biographical and tell some version of the real story, often based on the lives of the authors or their families. Any would make a wonderful gift for a family with a similar story to tell, or for an older child as an accompaniment to a longer book — we often forget that kids who can read longer books still treasure time poring over pictures.

I finish my list with go-to book gifts like cartoon collections (every day, I see another grade schooler carrying “Calvin and Hobbes”), the annual Guinness Book of World Records or a fantastic bargain coffee table book filled with pictures of space, or of earth from above, and then I try to get out of the bookstore without being sucked in by the giant toy display that’s dominating the children’s area this year.

Will you buy books for kids for the holidays, and for which kids — yours, or nephews, nieces and friends? Do you have any great recommendations to add to this list, of books, new or old, that you love to buy and give? Readers, in both senses of the word: weigh in!