Next Chapter Booksellers' Holiday Gift Guide 2019
There's a joke customers like to make: "you've read everything in here, right?" Individually, no-- but together, likely! Our booksellers love to make recommendations. We've picked 25 fabulous titles for all kinds of readers, from general to specific: anyone with a body, "your moody niece, hypochondriacs. Find the perfect book for that troublesome just-don't-know-what-to-get-'em and shop with confidence this winter!
Perfect for your cousin the science nerd, the morbid teen in your life, or your smugly healthy yoga teacher. Leprosy. Norwegian Scabies. Fatal Familial Insomnia. Those are just a few of the totally real conditions you probably already have. Learn the symptoms. Thrill to the prognosis. And resign yourself to the treatment. This handy little book will provide hours of pathologically good entertainment for worryworts of all ages. - DAVID
Perfect for everyone who moved away and misses the Midwest, fans of Kitchens of the Great Midwest and Lager Queens of Minnesota, and anyone looking for a funny, but smart book. Harley Jackson just wants to enjoy his quiet farm life. But when a calf born on Christmas Eve arrives with the face of Jesus staring out from the pattern on its hide, Harley’s life is turned upside down. Soon he’s running a religious theme park in the middle of Wisconsin and wondering if he can ever have a normal Christmas again. Jesus Cow is a warm but clear-eyed ode to smalltown life and a laugh-out-loud funny visit to the loving heart of the Midwest. - DAVID
Whatever you suppose fantasy means (matte painting mountain landscapes, a panoply of imitation Legolases) this isn't it. It's the story of a scheming kitchen-boy's precipitous rise and fall, filled to the brim with drowning girls! Desolate swamps! Hungry owls! And the word umbrageous! The Gormenghast books shade the gothic with the Modern, Tolkien with Forster with Nabokov and a little bit The Castle of Otranto. This book is for the impressionable youth who needs to move beyond Tolkien-- and it's for the reader of serious-stories-only! who must yet learn the uncanny is realer than the real. - EMILY
The harrowing and all-too-detailed true story of the Donner party, the deception and greed that led them to that pass in the Sierra Nevada, and the trauma felt forever by those who survived-- and lived even into the twentieth century. A book for anyone who loves American history, but especially for that relative who only reads about ADVENTURE and SURVIVAL but might get lost and die in a snowy K-mart parking lot. Remind them it's nice to stay home. - EMILY
There are very few masters of the English language, and James Baldwin happens to be one of them. He also happens to be one of the greatest believers in love and its power to liberate. This book is a rendition of love, without the cliché ending of a romance novel. For any reader who still believes in the silence of prose, and desires to renew their faith in love. - GUY
Maybe the first modern short story collection. Reading Turgenev is like waking up to bird-calls--jolting, naturalistic, consciousness-altering. No one else, not even Tolstoy, evokes pastoral Russia with such a compassionate brush. This book helped turn public opinion against serfdom, proving that political writing need not bear a whiff of sentimentality. - HANK
A dialogue between a dying mother and a boy who is dead or alive or a ghost or imaginary. Schweblin's narrative unspools in a continuous, unbroken thread of paragraphs, with phrases repeating like banshee chants. Fever Dream is an irreducible work, the kind that lingers in your mind far longer than any mere mass of words should. - HANK
A book of 19th century medical illustrations! Beautiful, horrible pictures of the mysteries of the body that hypochondriacs, medical professionals, and fans of great-but-terrible art will enjoy. - JASON
Brilliant, genius graphics and a beautiful meditation on the connections people have in 1970’s Omaha NE and their sad strange lives. 16 years in the making, some of these stories have appeared in ACME Novelty, but here they are collected and connected for the first time. Ware challenges the reader to dive in deep and concentrate on where he wants to take us, which is sometimes very uncomfortable. Be sure to check out the dust jacket...it is also a poster of sorts. P.S. I needed a magnifying glass for parts. - JASON
Remember when you would have to sit through someone’s slide show of their vacation? Imagine it with a world class photographer and essayist. You’ll learn something and shake your head at the gorgeous, quiet photos. - JASON
John Lithgow, author, actor, artist, and poet extraordinaire, has written a smart satirical chronicle, in verse, of President Trump's years in American politics lampooning all the president's men and women. Read-out- loud and laugh-out-loud fun for political junkies of a certain (obvious) persuasion. - JEAN
An epic family saga about Finnish immigrants who settled in the Pacific Northwest set against the upheaval of the early 1900s and the birth of the first labor movements in the fishing and lumber industries. It's a timely history of the immigrant's place in America and a good pick for lovers of historical novels. - JEAN
Top to bottom, inside out, Bryson explores the human body in his inimitable informative, humorous, and completely readable style. A great gift for anyone with a body. - JEAN
For anyone who enjoys excellent essays on a variety of topics or any fan of the New Yorker. - JOE
Perfect for people who wonder why anyone would give a frog a drum, young and old alike. For people who love vibrant illustrations and frogs. And little mushroom homes! - JOE
Christopher McDougall in Running with Sherman writes about animals, people who love animals, and people who figure out how to make the world be okay, but mostly about the tough sport of running races with burros. This true tale of Sherman the burro and McDougall's family and friends is enthralling! I started reading it as a joke and then couldn't put it down. This one is for animal lovers, athletes, or those who like the world to turn out to be okay once in awhile. - KATHY
Who knew that catering is interesting and adventuresome-- and not as much about star chefs as about the crazy ways things work and business on the fly? You're having dinner all dressed up at the Met under a Renoir, while they're cooking on card tables with sheets draped over them in the back hallway. Great read! This one is for those interested in the wide world of making good food. - KATHY
What does it mean to have your mother's trust? What would you do to earn it? To earn her love? In Adrienne Brodeur's case, it means embracing the role of accomplice in her charismatic mother's love affair. It means lying to her beloved step-father and betraying a cherished family friend. When Adrienne is fourteen, her mother, talented, flamboyant, Malabar, sneaks into her bedroom late at night and, as if they are girlfriends, rather than mother and daughter, announces that she is in love with her husband's best friend, Ben. She needs Adrienne's help. The atmosphere in their chic, very WASPy, Cape Cod home, where much revolves around cooking and cocktails, is steeped in booze, wealth, deception, guilt, and risk, and steams with sensuality, as the affair carries on for years. As Adrienne grows up, she realizes the extent of the manipulation she has endured and the effects it has had on her own life. Her writing is stunning; she tells the story with such grace, nuance, and empathy that wrong and right really do battle. Her fight for forgiveness, both for her mother and for herself is hard-won. Readers of Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle will love this book. Really, any mother's daughter should read it. - KEELIN
Give this to a political wonk or anyone who is trying to figure out just what the heck is going on in the world and how we got where we are today. U.S. foreign policy and the history of the last half of the twentieth century are examined through the life of diplomat Richard Holbrooke who began his career in the early '60s as an idealistic foreign service officer in Viet Nam. He supported American interests in countries all over the world, from Southeast Asia to the the Balkans where he negotiated that war's end, to Afghanistan. Holbrooke made friends and enemies throughout his service, and as often as he was admired for his brilliant writing, his keen historical perspective, and his clear-eyed understanding of world events, he was equally reviled for his self-promotion, his habit of flattery, and his hubris. His personal life is no less fascinating, a serial womanizer and lousy dad, he ran with many news-makers and celebrities. This is lively, engaging reporting by George Packer who paints a rounded portrait of a complex American living in a complicated historical period. - KEELIN
This straightforward guide is a must for anyone wanting to get acquainted with varieties of wine. The maps and tasting note charts are amazingly helpful! - MILAN
This straightforward guide is a must for anyone wanting to get acquainted with varieties of wine. The maps and tasting note charts are amazingly helpful! - MILAN
One of the best thrillers I’ve read in years, and it’s non-fiction. This is the story of Oleg Gordievsky, a principled KGB agent who fed information to the British intelligence service M16 for over a decade in the 70s and 80s, was found out by the Soviets, and lived to tell about it. It is also a story of Aldrich Ames, the US counter intelligence agent who spied for the Soviet Union and nearly brought Gordievsky down. This book is for those interested in 20th century history, the Cold War, or for readers looking for a fast paced spy story. Fans of John Le Carre and Tom Clancy’s early work would enjoy this book. - NICK
Marie Mitchell, an intelligence officer with the FBI, is recruited to work for an organization she believes is the CIA to undermine the charismatic revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara. All is not as it appears, and Marie's journey is as much about her own soul-searching as it is about her assignment. The story is unique because it places an African American woman at the center of a story of political espionage during the Cold War. It’s also based on real world events that took place in Burkina Faso. A literary thriller, a spy novel, a family drama, a romance, and more. This book was on President Obama’s summer reading list. It should appeal to a broad range of readers. - NICK
A magical realist fantasy about a society where men of high class and social status have two wives: one that tends to his business and one that attends to his home. It comes from a legend about a king who married both the sun and the moon. The protagonist of the story gets paired with her arch-rival when she marries the president of the country, part of a long line of corrupt politicians, and she has to use her position to go undercover to facilitate a rebellion and uprising. Oh, she also falls in love with the arch-rival. So it really has it all: fantasy, magical lore, political unrest, gay, and lots of action. It's marketed as a YA novel, but it's good for anyone who is interested in fantasy or dystopian worlds! - RILEY
RILEY SAYS:
Cog is a boy who is actually a robot, and the person who made him is like his mother. After an accident, Cog ends up at the lab he was created at and realizes that they're making him a weapon. He escapes the corporation in search of the caregiver scientist, along with a robot car, a Trash Bot, a robot dog named Proto, and another robot weapon named Ada. An action packed story for middle grade readers. Great for reading out loud and exciting enough that kids age 8+ get sucked in and need to know what's going to happen next. This has action, cool characters, robots, a lot of humor, and I think it's the right one for the kid that has a hard time enjoying reading.