It’s the most wonderful book-giving time of year
And you can always Secret Santa yourself
PeakTVhas peaked, movie theaters are no-go zones and the squirrels outside your windoware just lying around looking at their phones. We’re in the doldrums, and all signs point to a long, dullwinter.
But at leastwehave books.
Books to give as gifts. Books to give ourselves. Good ones are coming out all the time, which iswhy we’ve assembled a list of some topnewtitles to help point you in the right direction. There, our job is done.
Nowit’suptoyoutoskip the easy option and instead place your orders with a favorite independent bookshop, where your money willmean more.
“African American Poetry:
250Years of Struggle and Song,” KevinYoung, editor. You’re not meant to read this thick, handsome anthology fromcover to cover, but if you did, you couldmake out the shape of history. Fromslavery to CivilWar, jazz to civil rights, MOVEtoKatrina, and so on. As editorYoung (also the poetry editor at theNewYorker) says in his intro: These poets “wrote about what they saw around them, but alsowhat they dreamt up— even if itwas a dreamdeferred, derailed, or flat-out denied.” The poets include W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, AmiriBaraka, Maya Angelou, Nikki
Giovanni, June Jordan, Gil Scott-Heron, Hanif Abdurraqib, JamilaWoods, Paul Beatty, Major Jackson and more than 200 others, each with a bio to provide context.
“Ready PlayerTwo,”
ErnestCline. The much-anticipated sequel to 2011’s “Ready Player One” promises more of whatmade that book so popular: wild adventure, a crazy virtual reality, a fleet of beloved old toys, a nest of not-quite-obscure pop-culture Easter eggs and a handful of underdog gamers saving theworld/ ruining the economy by winning a trivia contest.
“WeKeep theDeadClose:
AMurder atHarvard and aHalf Century of Silence,” Becky Cooper. In her engrossing and vivid new book, ex-NewYorker staffer Cooper dissects a cold case that had become the stuff of legend and rumor at her alma mater: the 1969murder of Jane Britton. TheHarvard archaeology grad student was found bludgeoned to death in her apartment, her body sprinkled with red ocher powder. An obsessive researcher, Cooper digs past the urban legend and IvyLeaguepomptomake “WeKeep the Dead Close” a thoughtful, detailed pageturner.
“APromised Land,”
Barack Obama. In the intro to this 768-page memoir, the first of two, Obama looks back on his career andwonders whether hewas “too tempered in speaking the truth as he sawit, too cautious in eitherword or deed.” Starting with 44’s unlikely rise to political prominence and ending with the SEAL Team6 raid inAbbottabad 2 ½ years into his first terminoffice, “APromisedLand” offers eloquent,
precise and personal insight into an era that feels like a thousand years ago.
“Oak Flat: AFight for Sacred Land in the AmericanWest,” LaurenRedniss. The author makes her niche in the little-discussed “visual nonfiction” genre, writing and illustrating books that read like journalism but feel like artsy graphic novels (onlywithout all the boxes and speech bubbles). This one tells the story of the San CarlosApacheTribe in Arizona who’ve been defending their sacred land fromthe shovels and dynamite of a coppermining company since 2014. Between gentle, full-page colored pencil drawings of kind faces and blissful landscapes, Redniss offers mountains of research and interviews.
“TheKiller’s Shadow:
The FBI’sHunt for aWhite Supremacist SerialKiller,” John Douglas andMark Olshaker. When it comes to true crime, nobody’s got
war stories like Douglas. During his 25 years in the FBI, he helped launch the bureau’s criminal profiling unit, assisted in manhunts all over the country and sat downto interview someof the most notorious serial killers of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. It’s nowonder his gritty, straightforward books are so popular— he was there. This time, he and writing partnerOlshaker recount the cross-country hunt for a racist psychopathwhokilled more than a dozen people between 1977 and 1980.
“TheThirtyNamesof Night,”
Zeyn Joukhadar. It’s been five years since the transMuslim artist at the center of Joukhadar’snew coming-of-age novel lost his mother in a anti-Islamic attack, and still he feels lost. Half grief-stricken and halfnumb, the unnamed youngmanfinds himself unable to paint; instead hewanders theNewYork City streets talking to his mother’s ghost, making a note of every white male patriarchy transgression that comes to mind and looking for signs in the appearance of birds that seem to materialize out of thin air. Quietly powerful and full of surprises, “The ThirtyNames ofNight” is the literary heartbreaker of the season.
“ThePreserve,” Ariel S. Winter. Stephen King gave a thumbs-up to this sci-fi murdermystery set in a worldwhere robots are the dominant species after a global plaguewipes out most of humanity. Luckily the bots look just like us and seem pretty chill, and they’ve begun setting up idyllic preserves where humans can live free. The peace is shattered, however, when a corpse is found behind a grocery store, and nowit’s up to a human police chief and his robot partner to solve the crime. Equal parts noir and sci-fi, “The Preserve” is a smart little page-turner that gets its hooks into you early and keeps you guessing.