For my girlfriend’s 22th birthday, I give her 22 books.
I spent months asking her friends for recommendations of books she would like, making a list of the top recommendations, removing from it the books that she already have, or I've already read. The books ended up spanning a very wide variety of interests, and a lot of them were classics that I just hadn't gotten around to reading yet.
Yes, she is a huge book lover, usually choose a good book over a fancy dress, and believe reading is one of the great pleasures of life, and a book that is considered a classic in its field is hard to beat in terms of quality of content and what it gives you. All of them are literature in English since she prefer that, and most of the original version books really cost. I saved money for about half a year and finally got 2500 yuan to order all the books online. It took me another one month to wait, but thank god, they arrived on time for her birthday. You can’t imagine how happy I am while I was did the all handmade gift package. There is not much to say about our rendezvous for celebration, but she really get surprised by my big stack of books. She love it.
She and I are still reading them - haven't finished them all yet. And I'm sure that in a few years, our kids will read some of them. Other kids living in our neighborhood drop by and treat the book collection like a library. Relatives from other cities borrow bunches of books when they visit us and exchange them on their next visit after a few months.
So, not only do she get to read all those books, but we also get to be couple who encouraged and enabled a whole bunch of other people to read them. It's a long-term, high-and-wide impact gift.
