7 Books To Read This December

I never expected to get validation from a Timothée Chalamet soundbite, but when he said “it’s tough to be alive right now,” I felt it — especially throughout the past year. In conversations with friends and family, and in videos and posts on social media feeds, a general sense pervades: Joy has been hard to find.

How do we survive? Personally, I strive to maintain a balance of engagement and rest — staying informed, finding guidance and motivation in people who are working toward a better future, but also knowing my limits. A nonstop focus on tragedy, after all, renders me useless. That balance is reflected in the list below. Here, you’ll find books that challenge you to face and fight some of life’s darkest, most dispiriting realities, as well as books that remind you of the good stuff — friendship and strength, the power of art, and even magic.

Something Old

Movements and Moments, edited by Sonia Eismann, Maya, and Ingo Schöningh

In 2019, Indonesia’s branch of the global cultural institution Goethe Institut put out an open call for comics about Indigenous, women-led activism in the Global South. Out of 218 applications, eight were chosen to be included in this revelatory anthology. Artists from the Philippines, Ecuador, Nepal, Bolivia, Vietnam, Chile, Peru, and India illustrate stories of protests against colonialism and movements to protect the land, as well as biographies of women who galvanized their communities, tracing a centuries-long lineage of activism. When reading about people that history often ignores, if not explicitly suppresses, it’s impossible not to be moved by their strength and conviction.

Steeped to Death by Gretchen Rue

Last year I hopped aboard the cozy mystery train, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. (Does it have a cat on the cover? A fireplace, maybe some snow? I want it.)

If you’re looking to join me on this journey, Gretchen Rue’s Steeped to Death is a great place to start. The first of her Witches’ Brew Mystery series, Steeped to Death follows recently divorced 30-something Phoebe Winchester as she settles into the rural mansion she’s inherited from her late aunt — along with a tea shop-slash-used bookstore and a mysterious cat. As Phoebe delves into her aunt’s tea recipes, she soon realizes they contain a secret ingredient (magic!), and if finding out her aunt was a witch wasn’t enough to manage, she must also contend with a rude neighbor pushing her to sell and, of course, a dead body found in the shop. It’s comforting and silly, and the perfect book to settle in with on a cold night.

My Happy Life by Lydia Millet

Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet is probably best known for her 2020 novel, A Children’s Bible, but it’s her slim 2002 novel, My Happy Life, that really knocked me out. To say Millet puts her unnamed protagonist through the wringer is to put it mildly. After being discovered in a cardboard box outside of an orphanage, she spends her life suffering neglect and abuse at the group home as well as with multiple foster families — all of which we learn as she narrates from a locked cell in an abandoned mental institution scheduled for demolition. Wait, don’t go! This is very much a book that is not for everyone, but for the reader with a high threshold for trauma (🙋‍♀️) it’s miraculous. Millet has created a character seemingly incapable of recognizing harm, who can only perceive acts of cruelty as attempts at connection. She’s telling us, unironically, about her happy life. With this novel, Millet isn’t opining on the value or harm of extreme positivity, or a statement about victimhood. There’s no real message here. Fundamentally, it’s a fascinating, almost otherworldly account of a singular mind, staggering in its beauty and poeticism. (Still: The physical abuse in this book is grim and explicit. Go forth with care.)

Something New

Zero at the Bone: 50 Entries Against Despair by Christian Wiman

At the start of the second entry in Christian Wiman’s genre-defying Zero at the Bone, the poet and essayist comments on a poem — "Domination of Black” by Wallace Stevens — which he says might be his favorite: “I don’t know what this poem means, except that it means more than I know.” I gasped when I read the line. It was validation, from a bonafide poet, of the idea that you don’t need to “understand” writing to appreciate it, that an emotional response is a legitimate form of understanding, too. Fittingly, my love of Zero at the Bone is absolutely based in emotion. In 50 mini-essays exploring and challenging existential despair, Wiman offers heady analyses of poetry and scripture, balanced with intimate reconciliations of his own pain, beauty, faith, and doubt. It’s brilliant, affecting, and perfect for short visits driven by mood — whether you want to find clarity and comfort in the insights that land, or contemplate those that aren’t as immediately accessible.

Here in the Dark by Alexis Soloski

Alexis Soloski’s debut — a sharp, captivating thriller about a cynical theater critic who gets pulled into an investigation of a stranger’s disappearance — is a suspenseful page-turner filled with complex characters. The theater critic in question, Vivian Parry, is languishing in a junior position, resisting her boss’s plea to write some kinder reviews to balance out her many scathing ones. When a man requests an interview for what he claims is his graduate thesis, she’s alarmed to discover he’s been digging into a past she’s kept hidden, getting dangerously close to a secret Soloski expertly teases out. Unexpectedly, the man goes missing after their unsettling meeting and, against her better judgment, Vivian decides to help the quirky private investigator trying to find him. Good luck not finishing it in one sitting.

Songs on Endless Repeat by Anthony Veasna So

The literary world was shaken in 2020 when one of its most promising young writers suddenly died months before the release of his highly anticipated debut short story collection, Afterparties. The tragedy made the book’s success bittersweet; it was impossible to appreciate his immense talent without mourning its loss. Songs on Endless Repeat gives us a little more of his work, gathering both new and previously published essays, as well as fragments of fiction from the novel he was working on at the time of his death. The book continues Afterparties’ exploration of Cambodian American communities, queerness, and pop culture in a singular voice — shrewd, funny, inviting, and enlightening.

Something Out of the Blue

Plant Magick, edited by Jessica Hundley

Taschen books are absolute stunners that I don’t often indulge in (art books are pricey, and I already spend too much on books!) but I couldn’t resist the fourth volume of its Library of Esoterica series, Plant Magick. In its 520 pages, author and editor Jessica Hundley guides us through a timeline of humanity’s relationship with nature, going back as far as 10,000 BCE. Its vibrant, full-page imagery — over 400 paintings, photographs, botanical illustrations, and more — reveals a long lineage of plants used as tools in spirituality, healing, psychedelics, witchcraft, philosophy, and art. Exploring everything from ancient Sumerians’ medicinal botanical guides carved into clay tablets to modern artists’ use of plants in their activism, Plant Magick asks, what has nature given us, and how do we honor it in thanks?