Holiday Books and Thoughts
Shopping for books at the holidays is different from buying books at other times of year. Choosing for others is not the same as choosing for ourselves. We think about our loved ones’ sensibilities, remembering what they like, considering how they see the world, and pondering what will bring them pleasure.
Below are a handful of recommendations in several holiday shopping categories. (You can also find many more holiday recommendations on our Bookshop.org page.)
You Must Read This!
Books with a message you’re compelled to spread
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2013 Braiding Sweetgrass edged slowly onto best-seller lists, then settled in for a long stay. This thoughtful, deeply informed, and often lyrical exploration of how Western and Indigenous ways of knowing can work together touched a powerful cord for millions of readers.
Kimmerer’s new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, is a short, stirring follow up–really an essay between hard covers, with beautiful illustrations by John Burgoyne. Kimmerer picks up one of her essential themes–reciprocity–using the serviceberry shrub (Amelanchier arborea) as an organizing example and metaphor.
The Serviceberry’s fruit feeds birds, birds drop feathers which beetles devour, beetles become food for voles, voles decay and feed the soil, and the soil nourishes new serviceberry seedlings. “Abundance is created by recycling, by reciprocity.”
Kimmerer wants us to imagine how we too can nurture networks of generosity and mutual aid to create connection and abundance. This small but nourishing volume is a kind of metaphorical serviceberry shrub, going out into the world to fortify those with a taste for change.
(Also: there’s a shout-out to Swarthmore College students hidden in Kimmerer’s pages! Email us if you find it.)
Other new books with messages to spread
Big Enough for a Gift
Hefty books to show you care
Some people worry that a book is not big enough to count as a holiday gift. This is ridiculous, of course! Still, if you’re one of those people–or if you’re concerned your intended recipient might be–then one solution is a large book: sprawling and charismatic, maybe juicy and alluring. This holiday season brings several excellent options. Here are two:
Playground by Richard Powers
Fans of Powers’ The Overstory, a 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner, will be excited to pick up this sweeping, ocean-centric novel that braids together a handful of lives on an island in French Polynesia. The book received raves from all the places, including no shortage of comparisons to the vastness and mystery of the ocean itself. Even Barack Obama has weighed in, declaring that the book changed the way he thought “about Earth and our place in it.” 400 pages.
An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Even when she’s writing straight history, Doris Kearns Goodwin can tell a story with the flair and verve of a novelist. Here she weaves together the tale of her marriage to Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter for both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and a personal history of the ’60s. A few years back, husband and wife excavated the 100s of boxes of documents Richard had saved . This book shares their arguments about how to evaluate those complicated years, along with vignettes from their lives in and near the seat of American power. 480 pages.
Other long books to burrow into
The Book of Love by Kelly Link
Magic-inflected fiction set by the sea in New England. One of my favorite books of the year! 640 pages.
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higgenbotham
A complex, human look at the 1986 disaster. 579 pages.
Libraries, dreams, and timeless love. 464 pages.
Recent Prize Winners
Books celebrated as the best of the best
This retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the enslaved Jim is funny, fast-faced, smart, and sometimes heartrending. Everett–whose 2001 novel Erasure became the film American Fiction–cuts out the slow parts of Twain’s story and invents a few dicey situations that illuminate the experience of slavery in ways I’ve never read before. The scene where James teaches a group of enslaved kids how to talk “Black” in order to keep themselves safe is hilarious and poignant. One of my favorite books of 2024. National Book Award winner for fiction.
Kareem Between by Shifa Saltagi Safadi
For middle-grade readers, the story of a Syrian-American kid trying to make the middle school football team. Written in verse that flows along at a fast pace, this book tells the story of a kid who feels caught between dueling loyalties and is struggling to figure out how to do the right thing. National Book Award winner for young people’s literature.
Other 2024 prize-winners
Orbital by Samantha Harvey.
A novel about people on the space station. Booker Prize.
King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
An up-to-date look at MLK. Pulitzer Prize.
Holiday Themed
Books tuned to the season
There are lots of new holiday-themed romance books (Christmas in Spite of You by K.C. Wells—a Christmas Airbnb Oscar and Felix kind of situation, Love You a Latke by Amanda Elliot—two Jews in Vermont try to explain Hanukkah, and All I Want Is You by Falon Ballard—two romance writers are trapped in a snowstorm together—to name just a few). But the two titles I’m recommending are old favorites, which seems appropriate for this season of nostalgia.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
As Christmas approaches, I'm drawn back to this exquisite, tender, quiet yet powerful story of a comfortable Irish coal dealer who becomes discomfited by an encounter with an unwed mother he encounters behind the local convent walls. This slender book is a timely reminder of how society has often treated its young women, and also how bravery and compassion may surface in the most unlikely places.
A Child’s Christmas in Wales–on audio!
Dylan Thomas's gorgeous Welsh voice animates these lyrical, slyly funny recollections of his boyhood Christmases, “when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills.” In my family, we listened to this every year driving in the car to the grandparents’ for Christmas. And all year long, gorgeous (and often silly) phrases from it drift through my head, which is truly a gift.
Whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Lunar New Year, or any other winter holiday, I hope it’s a joyful one.