10 Books to Read or Gift This Holiday Season

We're closing in on the end of the year and everyone is rushing around to get things finished, with a little bit of senioritis.

Many of us are also still finishing Christmas shopping (and some of you won't even start until Christmas Eve) so it's rush, rush, rush right now!

To help you think through gifts for your favorite reader, or for you to have something to read during your downtime, we've put together a list to make it easy.

Books to Read or Gift This Holiday Season

Here are 10 books to either read or gift this holiday season (in no particular order):

1. Big Little Lies. A story about domestic abuse in the one percent, this is a compelling look at why women stay in abusive relationships, how it affects their children and their friends, and the big little lies they tell themselves to get through their days. While it's a bit of an elementary read the first three-fourths of the way through, it's worth the read for the last 20 or so pages.
2. Wild. You will either love or hate this book. For many, it creates a huge desire to want to take three months off to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. For others, it makes you wonder why the heck anyone would do that to themselves. And yet for others, you'll be disgusted with a woman who can't seem to get past her selfishness until after she's spent three months alone. The movie just came out (Reese Witherspoon) so you could even skip the book part and go right to the theater to see it.
3. The Goldfinch. The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and for good reason. Here’s the thing about it: Even if you don’t love the story (boy loses mom, boy loses dad, boy does lots of drugs, boy loses best friend, boy loses, loses, loses), the writing is like nothing we read anymore. Everything you’re taught about writing fiction is in this book. You are totally transplanted to the story; it's like reading music. You'll spend many a night up way past your bedtime to read.
4. Sweet Water. If you read books on a Kindle, you know that most publishers do this brilliant thing: They give you a chapter of the author’s next book so you keep reading. That’s what will happen after you read Orphan Train (see below), which is a New York Times bestseller. Cassie Simon leaves New York City behind to live on the land she inherited from her grandfather…and to live near her mother’s family; people she’s never known. It’s an interesting story of the ties that bind and how blood runs thicker than water.
5. Orphan Train. Molly Ayer, who is close to aging out of the foster care system meets an old woman, who was an orphan herself. She helps her clean out her attic one year and learns all about the struggles of a child who rides a train from New York City to the Midwest to find a family to raise her. While the system is much more sophisticated today, the struggles for those who are raised in it haven't changed in 100 years.
6. The Husband’s Secret. In a drunken stupor the night their first child was born, a husband writes his wife a letter to be opened upon his death. Several years later, in the middle of raising three kids, she finds it long before his death and struggles with whether to open it or pretend she never saw it. She eventually opens and reads it and what she finds inside is astonishing.
7. Once We Were Brothers. In Poland, a family takes in a boy the same age as their own son. As the boys grow up, they become more than just friends…they become brothers. When the war hits, though, the one boy stays with his family—who is Jewish—while the other goes off to serve in Hitler’s war. Fast forward to today when the Jewish man recognizes civic leader and philanthropist, Elliot Rosenzweig, as his old friend and soon-to-be enemy former Nazi SS officer named Otto Piatek, the Butcher of Zamosc. Of course, no one believes Rosenzweig could really be this horrible person and brushes off the claims as coming from a delusional old man.
8. The Weight of Blood. Written from a town in the Ozark Mountains, high school graduate, Lucy, learns a deep, dark secret about the mother she never knew; the mother who disappeared when she was a child. When a girl her own age goes missing and her body is displayed for all to see, Lucy grapples with losing her friend and losing her mother. What happened to both is shocking and disturbing.
9. The Snowman. The English translation of The Snowman is a little awkward, but if you can get past that, you’ll enjoy the murder mystery, set in the snowy mountains. Harry Hole, the investigator, discovers many women disappear on the first day of snow every year. As you can imagine, it’s difficult to track a killer who appears only once a year. This is a bit of a guilty pleasure, but a good read for those times your brain needs a break, but you want to keep reading.
10. After Her. Loosely inspired by The Trailside Killer case, Rachel watches her father’s life unravel as he tries to solve the case of the “Sunset Strangler.” It is a very poignant book about the secrets we learn about our parents as we get older.

A version of this recommended fiction first appeared on Spin Sucks