Off the Donkey Track’s Festive Season Gift Giving Book Guide
A few of my favorite books this year
Believe it or not, I am not all about adoption or history or examining grief or the universe! Here are a few of the books I’ve enjoyed reading this year that I recommend as holiday gifts to others to bring pleasure and joy into their lives – or to yourself – because you, too, deserve the pleasure and joy of a good book. While I’ve included the Amazon website link for each book, I only bought one of them via the web, so I’ve included a little story about where I got each book. I would love to see your list of recommended books. Happy Holidays, everyone!
Exploring Nature
National Geographic’s Into the Forest – The Secret Language of Trees. This beautiful picture book contains gorgeous photos of trees and essays on the latest science about the intelligence of trees and their role in shaping a world that is fit for humans and other creatures to live in. This book helped me have a better understanding of trees while I was working on my tree poem project. This book’s photos made me want to find the tree in each picture. As a bibliophile, there’s something about turning the pages of a book that smells just like the National Geographic magazines did when they arrived every month at my house growing up.
Bought in Yosemite National Park’s Conservancy bookstore while on a visit to the park with my daughter and my dog. My daughter lost an antique ring of her grandmother’s that day – the ring worked its way out of her yoga pants pocket at the Lower Falls. We like to think it was the spirit of her grandmother who wanted to remain there in the nature she loved.
Coming Back to Hearth and Home
This little book by June Cotner is full of good words celebrating the home and family life inside a home.
I bought House Blessings – Prayers, poems and toasts celebrating home and family at the Mission San Juan Capistrano gift shop when I was out enjoying the holiday lights and the musical tree of the Mission. So often, those of us who work from home need to remind ourselves that our house is also a haven from the outside, a refuge we return to at the end of a tough or a successful day. For me, this means closing the door to my office at night once I hear the mission bells ring the six o’clock dinner hour.
Essay/Memoir
Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner is a book just like I like to read it. Part essay, part rant, part memoir, this book covers a man who’s struggling to make sense of his father’s death, and who he is now. I bought this book at the Community of Writers Workshop I attended this year in Olympic Valley after hearing the writing read from his work. My only regret? Peter Orner was gone before I got an autograph.
There’s a tiny scene from the beginning that reminds me of me as a parent – Peter’s daughter tells him that he only loves books and apples – as they are visiting a park. Peter tells her how wonderful she is, but then confesses, “I’d had to look up from a page to respond and, the whole time, held my place with my finger.” Ouch.
Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read... by Orner, Peter (amazon.com)
Essays
Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a set of essays about finding wonder in ordinary things, like pecans (no wonder there for me as I am allergic to the nuts). I picked this book up at Dolly’s Bookstore in Park City in Utah on a Sunday afternoon break from helping to open a hotel in Park City.
The Book of Delights: Essays by Gay, Ross (amazon.com)
Children’s Book
Stacey Abram’s Stacey’s Remarkable Books, illustrated by Kitt Thomas, based on the politician’s life, teaches children about the power of books and reading.
I happened across this beautiful and inspiring children’s book in a Park City, Utah book store. Best of all for me, this book had the author’s autograph in it.
Stacey's Remarkable Books by Abrams, Stacey (amazon.com)
History and Economics
Love reading about people who live larger than life? Whose vision and excesses shaped the world we live in today? Then Bubble in the Sun is your book. Written by Christopher Knowlton, a former Fortune magazine writer and bureau chief, and contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. this book covers the Florida boom and bust cycle that contributed to the great depression. Its pages read almost like society pages as it describes the lives of all the people we know and whose names grace Florida’s city streets and colleges. Names like Flager, Tuttle, Mizner. But even the “little” people who packed up their old fords with tents and picnic hampers and drove to Florida to seek their fortune make an appearance.
I felt like I knew all the people that built Florida; I was a family member attending their parties, living in their offices, watching their marriages and fortunes grow and fall apart.
I bought this book in a bookstore in the Miami International Airport while visiting my new employer’s hotel on South Beach.
Amazon.com : bubble in the sun
Fiction
This book came to me in the best possible way – a loan from a good friend.
A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel, by Amor Towles is a romp through the Russian Bolshevik era, Russian literature and life and intrigue inside a luxury hotel. All from the view of a man who is forced to remain inside that hotel or be shot on the spot if he leaves. I’ve spent most of my adult life working for luxury hotel companies and I loved Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, so I couldn’t put this book down.
A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel has sold more than 2 million copies and will soon be a Showtime/Paramount series. I can’t wait!
https://www.amazon.com/Gentleman-Moscow-Novel-Amor-Towles/dp/0670026190
Race and Culture
Our Migrant Souls, A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” by Pulitzer Price-winning Hector Tobar, explores what it means to be Latino today. I was privileged to meet this journalist and educator at the 2023 Community of Writers Workshop in Olympic Valley this year.
This is a treatise on what has happened to a people by those who label them on the outside. It is also a love story about what is true inside the self and how a people can find pride and strength in the gifts they bring from inside themselves to this world. Beautiful, searing, empowering. Hector Tobar was one of my instructors at the 2023 Community of Writers Workshop in Olympic Valley.
Our Migrant Souls is the winner of the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and was named one of the New York Times 100 Notable books for 2023, in addition to being a Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2023.
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Migrant-Souls-Meditation-Meanings/dp/037460990X
Self Help
Lastly, I recommend the recently published Writing to Reckon Journal for Survivors of Spiritual, Religious and Cultic Abuse, by Gerette Buglion. Gerette Bulgion is the co-founder and Executive Director of the organization IGotOut and leads writing classes that help survivors process their journey from cultic relationships through the power of writing.
The book contains 31 writing prompts helping writers frame and celebrate their freedom from organizations that left them spiritually imprisoned.
This is the one book I actually purchased on Amazon, however, it’s a book of six degrees or less. Last year, I did an anthology reading at Diesel books and met Nicola Ranson, a writer working on a memoir about surviving a cult. Later, Nicola posted an Instagram Live broadcast promoting Gerette’s publication.
I will be honest – this book is on my to do pile right now, but I know it’s there when I’m ready.
https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Reckon-Journal-Survivors-Spiritual/dp/B0CH2CQQW8