All I Want For Christmas Is Books

It's all I want forever, really.

Welcome to the 2023 Holiday Gift Guide!

My current bookshelf because the following list is all books.

Do you think about retirement? As in, what you’d like your life to look like then? Given the state of the world, social security, and my meager retirement savings, I don’t expect I’ll be retiring until my current job pushes me out the door, but I still dream about it. Any number of folks I know talk about wanting to travel when they retire. I like to travel but if I had my way my retirement would involve little but a comfy cabin in the forest with a wood stove and ALL THE BOOKS. Rambling amongst the trees and reading books by the fire is pretty much my idea of heaven.

I started reading on my own in preschool. When I moved across the country after college, I packed one down comforter, one iron (why??), and five enormous boxes of books. For four years, I ran an independent bookstore. I have actual babies (who aren’t babies anymore) and then I have books, which are nearly as important.

Books as a gift are always a win. Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, birthdays, a random Tuesday— do we really need an excuse to give or happily receive books? And in an increasingly digital world, couldn’t we all use the encouragement to just sit down and read a paper book? Reading books helps retain attention span. It’s grounding and calming.

Bubble baths be damned, I’ll always choose a book.

Here are five books I’ve featured in the newsletter over the last year. I recommend all of them highly. If none of them appeal for the folks you’ll be gifting this year, you can check the holiday book list from last year. Or you can peruse every book I’ve ever discussed for the last three years in my online bookstore, hosted by Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores around the country.

In February of this year, I had the immense pleasure of meeting poet and essayist Ross Gay when he came to speak at the university where I work. Ross is one of the best models out there for how to hold both joy and sorrow in your hands at the same time. Without that skill, I don’t know how we survive this world or practice our integrity in a way that isn’t heavy enough to crush us.

It is such a simple thing, to welcome in joy and delight, but surprisingly difficult for many of us. Ross shows us how. He is a wonder.

Ross’s books of essays, Inciting Joy and The Book of Delights, are not to be missed. He has also published multiple volumes of poetry and has a new book of essays out now, The Book of (More) Delights, which I hope to receive myself this holiday season.

We’re not great at repairing harm in this culture. Instead, we tend to lean on victims to forgive as quickly as possible, which allows us to circumvent discomfort and protect existing systems of power. Discovering On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in An Unapologetic World was a revelation for me. Author Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg masterfully covers all the bases, from the harm we cause each other interpersonally to the harm we cause internationally. The steps to do the work are clear and doable, her language is accessible, and her heart is clearly suffused with compassion for our inevitable human frailty.

When I first read it, war was not raging in Israel and Gaza. Given that conflict, it might seem an odd time to dive into traditional Jewish ideas about repentance and repair. But I think it’s worth remembering that these ideas are also part of the Jewish worldview, just like there is a significant history in Islam of work for peace.

To encourage justice we must do the hard work of engaging honestly and compassionately with the harm we cause and enable. Ruttenberg gives us the framework.

One of the best memoirs published in 2023 was Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Smith is a poet by training, and in this story about her divorce and rediscovery of herself she writes like a poet— vividly and succinctly. But you don’t have to be a woman, or a parent, or someone who’s gone through a divorce to appreciate this book. Smith describes what it is to be a human being who is grieving and in search of some sense of wholeness. If that hasn’t been an experience you or someone you love has had yet, you will.

I gave my copy of this book to a dear friend after I read it. So, I could use a new copy for my very own, in case you were wondering.

All The Gold Stars is a book I read for the project I’m in the midst of for my paying folks on ambition right now. I wrote about Stauffer’s analysis of the perils of ambition last month and I’ll surely touch on her work again as the year progresses.

In the book, Stauffer dives into her own struggles with achievement and chasing external validation. Like many of us, her ambition became wrapped up in her identity and sense of worth, and chronic illness was the result. To make sense of that progression and develop a healthier relationship to striving, Stauffer works to extract ambition from the maw of capitalism, colonialism, and Calvinist morality. She argues that ambition will always be with us, and so it behooves us to redefine it for ourselves, “not as striving for a goal that dematerializes as soon as we reach it but more as an investment in our imaginations. In who we are. In what matters to us. In what we’re striving toward together.” I couldn’t agree more.

I have a reluctant relationship to cooking these days. After more than 20 years of feeding a family I mostly just want to be left alone to eat fried egg sandwiches and write. But I still love a good cookbook, almost as much as I love not being told what to do.

In Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat Samin Nosrat meets me where I am. She provides recipes, as all cookbooks do. But, more importantly, she breaks down the process of cooking into its essential elements.. You walk away from reading the book knowing why recipes work the way they do so you can improvise. Like I have to every time I open my refrigerator. (A meal planner I am not.)

The ability to improvise is the sign that you have truly mastered your instrument, and anyone who follows Nosrat’s teaching will be able to play in the kitchen with the greats. The structure of Nosrat’s teaching method also has wider lessons to offer about how to approach our integrity.

The cookbook collection of anyone who truly wants to excel in the kitchen is incomplete without this book, I think, but even if you’re not looking to become a better cook it will improve your life. It’s that good.

That’s it for this year’s list, my friends. Again, you can purchase all of these books (and more!) in my online bookstore. Full disclosure, I get a tiny cut of the profit if you purchase through my shop. Even more importantly, also again, the host, Bookshop.org, supports independent bookstores around the country (unlike Amazon) and THEY SHIP (just like Amazon).

Happy shopping!

XO, Asha