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The second annual What To Read If Gift Guide

Hi friends,

Hope you had a great Thanksgiving! I enjoyed the time with my parents and dog.

This week’s newsletter is a combination “Best of the Year” and gift guide. I went through my 2024 archives and chose a handful (but certainly not all) of my faves from this year and paired them with the perfect recipient.

A quick announcement before getting to the main attraction: Tomorrow, on Giving Tuesday, I’m donating the proceeds of my Bookshop.org store to the Little Free Library Impact Program. Every time you purchase a book through this newsletter, I receive 10% of the cost. This year, I’ve earned $100, which will now help Little Free Libraries in neighborhoods with limited book access. Thanks for your support!

And, now, what to gift to …

Your Fave Arm Chair Sleuth

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

Early one morning in August 1975, a counselor finds an empty bunk where one of her campers, Barbara Van Larr, should be. Barbara isn’t your average teenager. She’s the daughter of the wealthy couple who owns the summer camp, whose first-born son, Bear, disappeared fourteen years earlier.

Moore seamlessly alternates between the two timelines, in a narrative that includes long-kept family secrets (my favorite phrase in a novel’s description), simmering class divides between the Van Larrs and the blue-collar community they live in and a fully immersive setting.

More details here.

How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin

In 1965, a fortune-teller predicted Frances Adams, then a teenager, would be murdered. Frances then spent the rest of her life obsessively attempting to identify the culprit, even as her loved ones mock her obsession. More than five decades later though, Frances is found murdered, just as she always insisted she would be.

When Frances’ niece Annie Adams learns her aunt — whom she never met — named her as one of the heirs of her estate, she’s surprised. She’s more shocked to learn that whoever solves the murder will inherit everything. Armed with Frances’ teenage diary and the notes she took on potential suspects during her life, Annie sets out to finally solve the murder, even though it seems her aunt’s killer is targeting her as well.

Learn more here.

Glory Be by Danielle Arceneaux

Glory Broussard, the self-described “old, fat, Black woman” bookie/church lady titular heroine of Danielle Arceneaux’s debut novel, is one of the best amateur sleuths I’ve read in ages. As the phrase “bookie/church lady” implies, she’s one-of-a-kind and a total delight to hang out with.

As the novel begins, Glory is taking bets at her local coffee shop when she overhears a police radio describing a brutal death at the address where her best friend, a nun, lives. Law enforcement rules her friend’s death a suicide, but Glory doesn’t believe it. With her daughter — who is keeping some big secrets of her own — Glory launches an investigation that brings them in contact with church leaders, oil executives and a suspected voodoo priestess, among other colorful characters.

More here.

Your Bookish BFF

One-Star Romance by Laura Hankin*

On the eve of her best friend’s wedding, Natalie thinks things are finally going her way. She’s finally published a novel and she’ll soon be seeing Rob, the groom’s best friend/best man, who she had a strong connection with at the engagement party, again. Riding the adrenaline, Natalie checks her book’s reviews and discovers Rob gave it a single star.

The review, Natalie’s reaction to it and Rob’s reason for giving it, lurk below the surface of all their interactions over the next decade as their friends’ life events — christenings, housewarmings and more — continuously bring them together. Each time they meet, they’re forced to consider if they’re each other’s harshest critics or perfect matches.

More here.

Shakespeare Was a Woman by Elizabeth Winkler

Winkler is what’s known in Shakespeare circles as an “anti-Stratfordian,” — she doesn’t believe the Stratford man with the name William Shakespeare is the writer. In Shakespeare Was a Woman, she lays out the case, tracks its history and documents the surprising people who have supported it over the years, including multiple Supreme Court justices, Sigmund Freud, Walt Whitman and Prince Phillip. She also documents how it became a “literary taboo” to question the authorship of this body of work.

My full rec here.

Your Friend Who Runs a Book Club

A Quantum Love Story by Mike Chen

Mike Chen’s A Quantum Love Story is a time loop book unlike any I’ve read. As the book opens, Mariana Pineda receives a last-minute invite to tour the particle accelerator her recently deceased best friend and stepsister, Shea, dreamed of working at. Still grieving Shea’s loss, Mariana packs a picture of the two of them and meets her colleagues at the particle accelerator. While there, she runs into Carter Cho, who insists they’ve met before. He tells her to focus on remembering what he’s saying because they’re stuck in a time loop that’s about to restart.

From there, Mariana and Carter repeat the same four days — Monday to Thursday — that culminate in the particle accelerator’s explosion countless times, as they seek to break the repetition and prevent the detonation.

Full write-up here.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

If you had told me last year that one of my favorite books of 2024 would be about a single mom making a living on Only Fans and her pro-wrestler father, I would have looked at you like you had three heads. And, yet Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles charmed me so completely I’m still thinking about the characters months after finishing it.

Our title character, twenty-year-old Margo, does indeed have money troubles after her English professor gets her pregnant and promptly disappears after learning about the baby. After she’s fired for missing shifts due to lack of childcare and her roommates bail after too many nights spent with a screaming infant, Margo considers her estranged father’s offer to move in and offer childcare a godsend. When her dad, Jinx, mentions one of his former colleagues on the wrestling circuit now makes a living on Only Fans, a subscription website mostly known for adult entertainment options, Margo starts to consider a career that would offer her the flexibility to care for her child while paying her bills.

More here.

Your “Bridgerton” Obsessed Pal

A Caribbean Heiress in Paris by Adriana Herrera

Shortly after her father’s death, rum heiress Luz Alana Heith-Benzan sets sail from Santo Domingo to Paris for the Exposition Universelle with eyes towards expanding her family’s business — and a vow not to fall in love. Left without access to her inheritance unless she marries, Luz needs to grow her business so she can continue to provide for her sister.

But the heiress finds it harder than expected to stick to her plan when she finds buyers and shippers unwilling to work with a woman of color and meets the annoyingly charming James Evanston Sinclair, Earl of Darnick. After the Earl learns of Luz’s situation, he realizes a marriage of convenience could set her up to receive her inheritance and help him finally take down his shady father.

More here.

Hotel of Secrets by Diana Biller

Over the years, I’ve heard authors, notably YA author and psychologist Jennifer Lynn Barnes, talk about “writing to the id.” It’s a fancy way of saying to include things people love — and love to talk about — in a book to keep readers hooked.

Diana Biller’s Hotel of Secrets is the definition of writing for the id. Set in the luxurious world of 1870s Vienna, the book features glittering parties and ball gowns, sumptuous pastries, spies, scandal and more. In short, it has everything I want in an escapist novel.

Longer blurb here.

Your Favorite Non-Fiction Reader

Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker

Bosker first grew interested in the art scene after feeling like she was missing something when she heard acquaintances rave over paintings or sculptures she “didn’t get.” Her interest grew more piqued when every art insider she tried to interview implied they’d be blacklisted if they chatted. Bosker, fortunately for us, didn’t give up and ultimately ended up interning with two galleries, serving as an artist’s assistant and working as a security guard in the Guggenheim. She recounts these experiences — and her interactions with billionaire collectors and a nearly naked performance artist — in Get the Picture.

Full write-up here.

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party by Edward Dolnick

Science writer Edward Dolnick introduces us to the fascinating cast of characters who first found weird things in the dirt and then gradually pieced together the fossil record that gave us the story of dinosaurs we accept today. There’s Mary Anning, a poor, uneducated woman who had a preternatural ability to find dinosaur fossils; William Buckland, a quirky scientist attempting to eat every animal; and Richard Owen, who went from beloved researcher to quack after he rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Longer blurb here.

Your Foodie Friend

The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, translated by Jesse Kirkwood

The Kamogawa Food Detectives, written by Hisashi Kashiwai and recently translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood, follows a father and daughter who run a restaurant that specializes in recreating the dishes people dream of eating again. Visitors describe their meal — where they ate it, what it tasted like, when they enjoyed it — to Koishi and then her father Nagare, a former police detective, investigates until he feels confident he has the recipe down.

The book features a half-dozen or so interconnected stories, each following the same formula. A client describes their predicament, Nagare solves the case, and then as the customer eats, we understand why — beyond taste — this particular meal was so important to them.

More here.

Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World by William Alexander

Alexander tells the story of the humble tomato through ten moments in history when the fruit (yes, he explains the fruit/vegetable dichotomy) played a prominent role. Tracing it from when an early version of the tomato arrived in Europe from South America to the rise and continued dominance of Heinz ketchup, Alexander shows how the tomato went from a suspected lethal food to the most popular “vegetable” in the United States.

Full write up here.

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