The holiday gift-giving season approacheth (or is already here, for those of you who Black Friday). Time to make your list and check it twice, and I’m assuming you’ll be matching everyone on it with an appropriately bookish gift. Giving literary gifts can be tough, especially when you’re dealing with people who aren’t necessarily as into reading as you are. Here are a few ground rules to keep in mind:

1. Don’t be an evangelist. Your friends and family know you love reading, they know you loved [insert title you’ve been raving about all year]. Don’t use the holidays as an excuse to evangelize for the title and give it to everyone you know, regardless of whether they’re interested in it or not. That’s the literary equivalent of leaving a Bible tract instead of a tip. Don’t be that guy.

2. Spy on them (digital edition). Dive into their Goodreads or LibraryThing account. Most users have a TBR set up on their bookish social media profiles–it’s a built-in shopping list for you! Bookish Instagram users tend to post pics of their current reads, which will give you an idea of the person’s taste.

3. Spy on them (physical edition). Creep your friends’ bookshelves. Do they have every book by one author, minus one? Get them that one. Do they have multiple editions of a certain title? They’re probably collecting them–get them a nice new edition.

4. Explain yourself. When you’re gifting books (especially to non-readers), explain why you picked that title. I like to write a quick note on a bookmark or Christmas card and insert it into the book before I wrap it. Some people write an inscription. For example, if you’re giving your nerdy science-loving brother The Martian (good pick), write something short about how the book will scratch his NASA itch and penchant for bad puns and saying the f-word. It just lets people know you really considered their interests before picking the book.

5. Ask the perfect question. An old tip from my bookseller days: ask the person you’re shopping for what the last book they read that they loved was. Work it into a conversation that doesn’t have to do with gift-giving, obviously. The answer will show you what genre or tone or style of book the person likes, and you can take it from there.

6. Ask the next most perfect question. If the person isn’t a reader, ask them what the last movie they loved was. Was it a Marvel superhero flick? Get them a trade of one of the comics or the Marvel Avengers Encyclopedia. A Wes Anderson project? Stick with literary fiction. You get the idea.

7. Don’t limit yourself to books. There are so many options for bookISH gifts that aren’t actually books. Bookish t-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, totes. Check Etsy (or our own Book Riot Store) for ideas.

8. Stay away from gifting a whole series. It might be tempting to give your best friend all the extant volumes of Game of Thrones so you two can finally talk about what happens to Sansa, but what you’re really gifting is a lot of pressure. Several thousand pages of pressure. Don’t put your friends and family in a position where you’ve spent a lot of money and they have to then spend several weeks doing something they might not be interested in so they don’t hurt your feelings.

9. Ask an indie bookseller. If you’re lucky enough to have a local indie, head over and grill the staff. They LIVE for this. Have a great-uncle obsessed with the Civil War and CSI:Miami and you want to gift him a book but don’t know where to even start? That’s a puzzle for a bookseller, my friend, and they always come through.

10. Get tangential. This is especially handy for non-readers. Find out what they’re into (bird watching, basket weaving, World War II history, pop culture, whatever) and get a book tangentially related to that topic. A novel of WWII for the history buff (Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky is a great choice–the author died in Auschwitz so there’s a lot to parse). H is for Hawk, a memoir of hawking as a method of grief recovery, for the animal lover.

Wrap, read, rejoice.

If you need holiday gift ideas for the big readers in your life, you’re in luck—because some absolutely incredible books came out in 2018. So many, in fact, that curating a list of the definitive best is an impossible task.
We scoured a year’s worth of reviews and best-of lists, polled our staff, and reached out to voracious readers and writers for their top picks to compile this selection of 2018 titles that are groundbreaking, or paradigm shifting, or so exceptionally written that everyone is talking about them. Through fiction and nonfiction prose, these books look at life through a kaleidoscope of experience, tackling often difficult issues that helped define 2018—for better or for worse (or maybe a little of both).

Books are one of those gifts that keeps on giving, since they offer you the chance to talk about the work and pass it on to others. Plus, purchasing a writer’s book is an amazing way to support authors whose work you love and whose voices deserve to be heard. And if you read something you love, finding a minute to review it online or recommend it to a friend can truly help amplify an author’s reach.

To help you get started, here are 21 books published this year that would make great holiday gifts.

Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly

In this excellent collection of essays, Chemaly explores women’s anger—which is so often dismissed, but holds incredible transformative power. Don’t take it from us, take it from Gloria Steinem, who graced the book with this convincing jacket blurb: “How many women cry when angry because we’ve held it in for so long? How many discover that anger turned inward is depression? Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her will be good for women, and for the future of this country. After all, women have a lot to be angry about.”

Milkman by Anna Burns

Milkman, which won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, is set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It follows a teenage girl attempting to avoid sexual advances from a middle-aged paramilitary she calls “milkman.” Kwame Anthony Appiah, the 2018 Man Booker Prize chair of judges, described the book as “a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humor.”

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The Mars Room, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal, is a novel about characters in the fictional Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility in central California. “Originally, I was drawn not so much to tell one particular story, but instead to try to understand the prison system in California,” Kushner explained in an interview. “To look at who ends up serving long sentences in these facilities that are placed deep in the Central Valley, which is otherwise all industrial farming. I tried to learn everything I could about the criminal so-called justice system, and from there, began to think about people’s lives; about class, race, destiny, chance; and the way our society is structured.”

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele

Khan-Cullors, who co-founded Black Lives Matter in 2013 alongside Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, wrote a memoir that explores her own experience growing up as a black woman in America, the early stages of her movement, and what happened when #BlackLivesMatter took off.

There There by Tommy Orange

The New York Times describes Orange’s book, which follows a variety of characters who intersect at a powwow in California, as “a new kind of Native American epic,” which explores the history of violence against Native Americans and how that has come to bear in the present day. Orange says: “There’s been a lot of reservation literature written. I wanted to have my characters struggle in the way that I struggled, and the way that I see other native people struggle, with identity and with authenticity.”

Am I There Yet?: The Loop-de-loop, Zigzagging Journey to Adulthood by Mari Andrew

“You’ve probably seen Andrew’s beautiful yet hauntingly relatable and simplistic Instagram illustrations that entirely nail the human experience,” says Katie Tamola, a freelance writer who writes about reading. “This is a book about youth, grief, relationships, and reality. The illustrations perfectly highlight Andrew’s ability to invite the reader into a world of thoughtfulness, healing, and gratitude. All my friends who are navigating their twenties and often find themselves lost (which is the current place I operate out of) have also loved it.”

A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza

In this novel, which is the first book published by Sarah Jessica Parker’s imprint, SJP for Hogarth, Mirza writes about a Muslim family living in California who gather for a young woman’s wedding. Mirza told The Guardian that the book is “like a long love letter to the life that was mine right until I started writing it.” She doesn’t want readers to focus on the characters’ religion. “To me it was always a story about brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons—they just happened to be Muslim,” she said.

Educated by Tara Westover

Former president Barack Obama listed this book as one of his summer reads, commenting, “Tara Westover’s Educated is a remarkable memoir of a young woman raised in a survivalist family in Idaho who strives for education while still showing great understanding and love for the world she leaves behind.” Westover, who never set foot in a classroom until her first day of college, writes about growing up working at her family’s junkyard, studying solo for the ACT, and struggling through her first semester of college. She flourished, and now holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge.

Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free by Wednesday Martin

Martin, a cultural critic, does a deep dive into women’s infidelity for her latest book. “As someone who is usually pretty salty about the sexual double standard that lets men fool around but penalizes women for not being faithful, I read Untrue with great interest,” says Jessica Wakeman, SELF’s interim beauty editor. “I’ve always wondered why everyone believed men are inherently one way when it comes to sexual appetite and women are the exact opposite. Martin interviews anthropologists who study sexual behavior for the latest research and found that females in many species are a lot randier than we’ve been told.”

What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky

“Heather Havrilesky is one of the nation’s most beloved advice columnists and essayists, and her latest book of essays, What If This Were Enough?, is proof of why,” says Wakeman. “These read like well-written, culturally acute missives from your smartest girlfriend. Whether she’s ruminating about BuzzFeed, Disneyland, her late father’s driver’s license or her mother’s house, she’s a thoughtful and interesting writer.”

The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

In this novel, Syrian American writer Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar follows two Syrian women leading parallel lives almost 800 years apart. As Nour and her family are forced to flee conflict in present-day Syria, she comforts herself with the story of Rawiya, who disguised herself as a boy in order to become a mapmaker’s apprentice in the twelfth century.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

In An American Marriage, Jones writes about newlyweds Celestial and Roy—and what happens when Roy is sentenced to 12 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The New Yorker described the novel as “both sweeping and intimate—at once an unsparing exploration of what it means to be black in America and a remarkably lifelike portrait of a marriage.”

She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore

Moore’s novel, which combines history with magical realism, reimagines the early years of Liberia through three main characters: an exiled woman from the Liberian region, a former slave from Virginia, and the Jamaican son of a British colonizer and a slave. Moore, who was born in Liberia and raised in the United States, said in an interview: “I knew that if I wanted to tell the story of Liberia, or attempt telling the story of Africa, then it had to be through the eyes or from the perspective of womanhood, black womanhood, and African womanhood.”

Little Fish by Casey Plett

Casey Plett used to write a column for McSweeny’s about being transgendered. In her debut novel, a transgender woman named Wendy Reimer discovers that her grandfather—a devout Mennonite farmer—may also have been transgender. Trans readers laud Plett’s ability to get at the heart of their experience, while non-trans readers say they closed the cover feeling enlightened.

Insurrecto by Gina Apostol

Apostol’s novel is about more than the Philippine-American War. Her story—of a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker who take a road trip through the Philippines to work on a film script about a massacre—is also about truth, memory, and who gets to write history.

Circe by Madeline Miller

In her latest novel, Miller adapts and retells the Greek myth of Circe, a goddess who transformed her enemies into wild animals, featured in Homer’s Odyssey. Publisher’s Weekly called the book “a classic story of female empowerment,” and Miller has spoken about why she chose to write about Circe and the process of reimagining the character. “This is the story of a woman finding her power and, as part of that, finding her voice,” Miller told BookRiot. “She starts out really unable to say what she thinks and by the end of the book, she’s able to live life on her terms and say what she thinks and what she feels.”

If You Leave Me by Crystal Hana Kim

Kim’s debut novel, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, is an intergenerational saga that starts in wartime Korea. It’s at once a love story, an exploration of female autonomy, and a tale of war and refugee life that offers a unique, human view from within a splintered nation.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

This novel, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Awards, follows two characters, one grappling with the AIDS crisis in 1980s Chicago, the other experiencing the decades-long repercussions of it in modern-day Paris. When the book came out this summer, Makkai promoted it while raising money for Vital Bridges, a food pantry serving those living with HIV/AIDS. She lists other worthy organizations on her website.

Putney by Sofka Zinovieff

Zinovieff’s novel, about the relationship between a young girl and a much older man in the 1970s, and the woman’s present-day reckoning with what actually happened, raises important questions about consent and agency.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston

This book is based on Zora Neale Hurston’s interviews with Oluale Kossula (also known as Cudjo Lewis), the last known survivor of the slave trade, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Publishers wouldn’t print the book at the time—it’s written largely in Kossula’s specific vernacular, and the Smithsonian magazine reports that interested parties wanted Hurston to “translate” the dialogue. The manuscript stayed unpublished for over 80 years until its release this year.

The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison

Jamison’s latest book is a memoir about addiction and recovery—and so much more. She also includes the addiction stories of famous—and non-famous—people, cultural analysis of how we think about addiction and sobriety, and some truly excellent scholarship and reporting.

I’ve always been a total book addict. I’m addicted to the emotions, excitement, touch, feel and smell of books. If I could live on books and nothing else, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

So yes: I’m a bit of an addict. Hi, my name is Megan and I’m a bookaholic. If you have any of these fifteen warning signs, you’re a bookaholic too. But don’t worry about kicking the habit. Books are awesome. So if you’re a girl, Cosmo made a list of feminist book to read.

1. Over 90% of any wishlist (birthday, Christmas, shopping list) are books.Who needs food and clothes anyway? And if you ever go into a bookshop or library, you leave with at least five books more than you planned on buying. Oops…

2. Your friends or family chat about TV or film adaptions of books and all you can say is: “Please. The book was a million times better. I mean, the film didn’t even mention this, they changed that, they didn’t have this quote, they…” Double points if aforementioned friends and family roll their eyes and say “Typical insert-your-name-here”.

3. Everyone else you know has pictures of the latest band, movie or animal on their wall, but your walls are covered in bookshelves, book posters and book postcards.

4. Speaking of your room, you have so many books in your bedroom that they’ve spread of off the bookshelves onto floors, desks, chest of drawers and beds. But really, who needs to see their silly old floors anyway?

5. Most kids went as pop stars, footballers, doctors, nurses and superheroes to dress-up-as-what-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up day, but you went in wearing normal clothes with a notebook tucked under your arm. You also gave scathing looks to anyone who asked “What are you meant to be?” Because, obviously, you were an author.

6. Some of your best friends aren’t ‘real’ – as non-book-addicts put it.They’re characters from your favourite books. Your heroes also aren’t pop stars, movie stars or humanitarians. They’re authors. You look up to authors as godlike creatures who hold your favourite characters’ fates in their hands.

7. You have been mentally scarred by books (Harry Potter, The Fault In Our Stars, War Horse…). But despite this they make you happier than anything else. Until you finish them. Then it feels like your heart has broken and the hole in your soul will never be healed. Until you find your new favourite book…

8. You are the go-to-person for book recommendations. Everyone knows you read more than a normal mortal and that, generally, you always have a suggestion. Book addicts are awesome like that!

9. You can bring any topic back around to your fave book. For example: “Ah, the dangers of cyber-crimes. We’d really be so much safer if we all bank at Gringotts, where of money would be looked after by goblins and dragons. It’s really only logical. In Harry Potter…” “Oh, your boyfriend’s name is Eddie? He’s brilliant in Vampire Academy: I really love him. Have you read that yet? It’s so…” And so on and so on.

You also have a bookish quote for all situations. Wishing someone good luck: “May the odds be ever in your favour.” When someone says something about reality: “Of course it’s happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” A dramatic, heart-breaking, beautiful love story: Snape’s “Always” and TFIOS’s “Okay? Okay.” I could go on – trust me… All your advice comes from books too – you just direct people to your favourite book on the topic!

10. You don’t have normal dreams: you dream about worlds you’ve visited in books, characters you met in books and adventures you’ve had in books. Basically, you’re all books, all the time. You even daydream about books.

11. You’d do anything (eat a poisoned apple, spin gold from hay) if you could live in your favourite bookish world – even just for a day.

12. When you grow up and have children (or pets), you plan to name all of them after your favourite characters from books. Poor Hermione, Augustus, Luna, Magnus and Sherlock…

13. You’d happily give up the real world (and food) if you could just live in books all the time. Actually, if you’re reading an awesome book, you do ignore the real world – you forget about water, sleep, homework and other people. People have to say your name five times to even get your attention and you end up sleep deprived because you stayed up super late to finish the book. But you don’t care because that book… it was so worth it!

14. When you’re trying to do revision for exams, you settle on this little reward system: for every two chapters of the revision book you read, you can read a chapter of the fiction book you’re currently reading. I mean, what better reward is there than a chapter of an awesome book? (Your friends say the answer is biscuits, YouTube or sleep. You agree to disagree.)

15. If you were freezing to death and had to put something on the fire to keep it burning, you’d burn your own clothes, pencils, shoes, food and even your own hair before you’d throw your books on. Who cares if you survive, so long as your pretties are ok?

When you’re a book-lover like me, you can’t help but express your passion for all things literary, all the time. Ask anyone who knows me, and they’ll tell you I’m constantly recommending new novels, debating book-to-screen adaptations, sharing author news, or giving books away to anyone who will take them. When people come to my house, whether it’s for dinner, a game night, a cookout, or just a quick visit, no one leaves without a book — or a stack of them — in their arms. It’s a habit I picked up a few years ago, and it’s one that has changed the way I think about reading.

For a lot of book-lovers and bibliophiles out there, the idea of lending, let alone giving, books away is like stepping straight into a newly discovered circle of hell. As readers, we get attached to our handsome hardcovers and priceless paperbacks, and there is nothing we enjoy more than watching our bookshelves get filled with read and unread titles alike. Because to us, books are so much more than ink, paper, and cloth. They are adventure and inspiration, mystery and romance, empowerment and empathy. They are our tickets out of this world, and into another one entirely.

But as much as we bibliophiles hate lending, giving, losing, or damaging books from our own personal libraries, we equally love spreading our passion for reading. The best way to do that? Giving great books to good people.

I have always been fond of collecting books, and when I left home for college, I brought more boxes of books with me than I did clothes, refusing to leave a single one behind for my family to take, or worse, get rid of. Over the years, and through the course of eight semesters as an English major, those boxes multiplied even more and eventually became the bulk of possessions that followed me when I moved to New York and began a career in publishing. I moved into my tiny city apartment with a bed, a suitcase full of what professional clothes I had, and more than three bookshelves worth of worn paperbacks, unread hardcovers, and even some picture books from childhood. It was, in my mind, the foundation to the epic library I would someday build in whatever kick ass apartment I landed after publishing my first of many successful novels. (Hey, a naive millennial can dream, right?)

But after working in publishing for just a few weeks, I realized my new career was to my bookshelf what food and water was to Gremlins after midnight. Suddenly, and without warning, my collection multiplied to dangerous levels. Between the books I got from my employer to the ones I got as industry perks, I quickly and without warning not only had too many books for my shelves, I had too many books for my coffee and bedside table, for my closet shelves and my living room floor.

Since watching the iconic scene in Beauty and the Beast, I had always dreamed about having an epic library, but the reality of my space turned that dream into an overwhelming, disorganized, stress-inducing nightmare. My books, at least some of them, had to go. But where?

Like most people who have too much of one thing, I decided to go through my personal library and weed out the books I didn’t think I needed anymore, or books I didn’t like. I lived in New York, after all, and I knew there were dozens of non profit literary organizations who could use two of my three copies of Little Women or my still unopened collection of Dr. Seuss classics. But even after packing up boxes of books to donate, I still had way more than I could ever read (let alone fit in my tiny home) in a lifetime.

That’s when I started giving books to anyone who came over my house.

It started when I had a friend come by for a drink after work. We were chatting on the couch about one thing or another, when something in the conversation made me think of a book I had sitting on my nightstand. I immediately leapt up and grabbed it to show her, and after seeing her interest, insisted that she take it home, read it, and not give it back. She was delighted. A week later, after she finished the book, she said it was the best thing she had read all year, and she wondered if I had any other recommendations for her.

She had no idea what she was getting herself into, asking a book hoarder for more books, but I immediately recognized the new opportunity at hand. Soon enough, gifting books was a tradition I stuck to — and guests began expecting — whenever someone stopped by my house.

Flash forward to a few years later and a new career as a books writer and reviewer, and I still have more books than I know what to do with. Every day, the mail brings review copies of upcoming titles, paperbacks of last year’s best books, and just about everything in between. But now, I have a way of keeping the stock under control, at least a little bit, because I don’t let anyone — not my visiting family members, friends, colleagues, or acquaintances — leave my house without at least one new title in their hands.

Sometimes when I’m reading a new book, I know who I want to give it to by the end of the first chapter. Something about the character reminds me of a friend who can relate, or the plot is relevant to a discussion I had with one of my sisters, and I just know they’ll appreciate it. Other times, it works in reverse, and a conversation at game night sends me running down the hall to my office to grab a book that would be just perfect for my visitor. No matter how it happens, sharing books has become something I not only do for work online, but something I do for fun in person. For fun, and, I’m learning, for inspiration.

There are the books I love so much, I keep multiple copies on hand to give out like candy on Halloween. I can’t tell you how many people have left my house with We Should All Be Feminists and Hope In the Dark in their hands. There are the novels that I love and want to give away, but can’t part with myself, so I buy a second copy to stow away until the right person comes over for dinner. And then there are the books on my shelves that deserve a better home, one that will give them more attention. Usually titles I have already read, or have had for a year and still haven’t gotten around to, these books live on a browseable bookcase I tell people to please, please take something from. Because no matter how much I love my books, I think I have come to love sharing them even more.

Giving someone a book is like giving someone a piece of your soul. You may not have written it, but in reading it and experiencing it, a book has become a part of you. Passing it onto someone else is, in a way, like passing on that piece of yourself, too. Whether it be your interests, your dreams, your fears, your opinions, or your inspirations, you are giving someone so much more than paper and ink when you give them a book.

Books have the power to do so much. They can entertain and educate. They can empower and empathize. They can expand the mind, nurture the heart, and grow the imagination. They can take people out of their own experiences, and give them an opportunity to walk in someone else’s shoes.

When you give someone a book, it is the closest you can get to giving someone the world — or at least, a world. And luckily for me, I still have so many worlds left to give.