Stocking-fillers: A seasonal run on the ideas bank

One of the best jokes in this year's crop of upmarket stocking-filler titles is a wholly inadvertent one. In the sparky and provoking What Are You Optimistic About? (Simon & Schuster, 12.99), John Brockman literary agent to the planet's biggest brains and guv'nor of the ever-stimulating Edge website asks almost 150 scientists, seers and other gurus (from Steven Pinker to Brian Eno) about their reasons to be cheerful. And what subject strikes hope into the heart of Old Etonian zoologist and (now retired) amateur banker Matt Ridley, who as chairman of the board oversaw the Northern Rock train-wreck? "The future. That's what I'm optimistic about." Thank you, the Hon Matt, and I hope you enjoyed the 24bn that our little Christmas whip-round raised for you.

Ridley aside, Brockman's compilation radiates bright ideas. Let's hope that the various upbeat views on halting climate change prevail soon enough to justify Walter Isaacson's faith in the prospects of "print as a technology". If not, then we may not see many more seasons of Nordic forests felled to manufacture loo-bound volumes stuffed with short-breathed snippets. Talking of toilets, the DIY experiments drolly recounted by New Scientist problem-solver Mick O'Hare in How to Fossilise your Hamster (Profile, 7.99) not only warns you about the now-infamous explosive reaction of minty sweets with cola (don't try it at home) but finally delivers chapter-and-verse about the alarming effects of asparagus on pee. Priceless.

Still in the domain of semi-serious science, John Mitchinson and John Lloyd's QI spin-off Book of Animal Ignorance (Faber, 12.99) herds an A-Z of bestial trivia into its pages, from the greedy aardvark (which can down 10 pints of termites in an evening) to the frugal ribbon worm (which, in hungry times, can eat 95 per cent of its own body length). Above the earth rather than within it, Antony Woodward and Robert Penn's day-by-day companion to the British weather, The Wrong Kind of Snow (Hodder, 14.99), is worthwhile enough to shine for longer than gimmicky giftbooks often do. On 30 November 1784, the first weather-balloon went up in Britain in Grosvenor Square.

All such books aim to slap a fig-leaf of useful knowledge (even if it's only ever useful in the pub) on the flabby torso of time-wasting self-indulgence. Sometimes, the smarter stocking-filler may even help you to think better as well as to trounce the rival quiz crew. From Glenn Miller (not killed in a brothel scrap in Paris) and the Bermuda Triangle (not untypically fatal to mariners) to the Loch Ness Monster (not there at all), Albert Jack's Ten-Minute Mysteries (Penguin, 12.99) offers a crash-course in sceptical thinking and although he doesn't put it like this ways to wield Occam's razor and focus on the real evidence.

Still in the mind gym, I Am, Therefore I Think, edited by Alexander George (Sceptre, 7.99), poses philosophical questions to a panel of professional thinkers. Philosophically, they disagree. "Is it morally wrong to tell children that Santa exists?" Either this is "a false belief that has very low costs" or else "the risk of losing trust in one's parents' testimony is... not trivial". Take your pick, or ask any passing reindeer.

Less ambiguous advice comes from Mark McCrum in his handbook of etiquette for travellers, Going Dutch in Beijing (Profile, 9.99). Globe-trotters may think they know the culture-specific ropes about eye-contact, left hands, queues and how to nab a second helping. But McCrum goes the extra mile into Japanese unlucky numbers (four is not fab), three kisses rather than two (in Brazil and, oddly, Belgium) and the Mexican curse of the yellow flower. Fingers crossed that you get it right (but not in Uruguay).

Hard-core data hounds will crave the 2008 edition of Whitaker's Almanack (A & C Black, 40) in all its 1,360-page grandeur, from the forms of address for a countess in her own right to the exact divisions of the Cenozoic era. Time-poor browsers will still find that the dwarf version Whitaker's Almanack Pocket Reference (6.99) packs an unfeasibly huge volume of Oscar winners, Chinese dynasties and boiling points into its 220 pages. Some office wag has even slipped in a list of Bad Sex Award victors.

Which brings us back to humour and its utter absence from the vast bulk of "funny" books directed at the unwary Christmas punter. Two glorious exceptions depend on absurdities discovered rather than invented. Parody it may be, but Joel Stickley and Luke Wright's Who Writes This Crap? (Hamish Hamilton, 12.99) owes its superb strike-rate to the fatuity and vacuity of all the verbal junk it so accurately mimics. From fancy snack foods ("Ye Olde Englishe Really Real Crisps since 2006 Wild Swan & Pine Needle") and naff sportswear ads ("Il Lione... it means lion, in Italian") to corporate disclaimers ("All email data may be stored and monitored for the purposes of security, training and blackmail"), they leave no brand of modern toxic text unscorned.

In Potty, Fartwell and Knob (Headline, 9.99), fact-truffler-in-chief Russell Ash has trawled centuries of census data to deliver a 250-page collection of true but silly names, from Catharine Harddick and Lou Paper to Fanny Minger and, strangest of all, Dorothy Tony Blair (born in Altrincham, 1889). I can see no possible justification for a puerile and tasteless compendium that panders to the lowest barrel-scraping grade of British bodily-functions "humour" apart from the fact that it may well make you laugh like a hyena.