Best Reads: Holiday Book Recommendations for 2022

A good book combines the best qualities of a tangible gift and an experiential gift for family and friends. Jessica Kaplan and Mark Fowler, owners of the local independent bookstore, Bronx River Books at 37 Spencer Place in Scarsdale Village, recommend these season’s readings:

Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead is one of this year’s most popular and most highly praised novels; it’s a ten-best books of 2022 selection by both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Kingsolver transplants the basic narrative of Dickens’s David Copperfield to rural Kentucky, where the son of a dirt-poor, teenaged single mother makes his way through a perilous world. “I was a lowlife . . . born in a mobile home, so that’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash.” Frequently funny, frequently gut-wrenching.

Kevin Wilson’s big-hearted new coming-of-age novel Now is Not the Time to Panic focuses on two misfit teens who connect one summer. An enigmatic, unsigned poster they create and pin up around town ignites a panic that changes their lives forever. Wilson keenly remembers what it was like to be a teenager.

Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry and Tom Perrota’s Tracy Flick Can’t Win humorously depict the glass ceiling that women have too frequently faced in climbing the career ladder. In Lessons, Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant chemist, is forced to forgo a career in the lab and to become instead a television chef to cope with life as a single mother. In Tracy Flick, the protagonist is an assistant principal at the high school that she earlier attended as a teenager, who strives to become principal, which proves to be a daunting goal.

Westchester resident and Bronx River Books favorite Patrick Radden Keefe has released a wonderful collection of his New Yorker essays on all sorts of colorful wrongdoers entitled Rogues. His previous book, Empire of Pain, won the 2021 Bailie Gifford award, the English-speaking world’s premier prize for non-fiction.

Another gem is this year’s Bailie Gifford winner: Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell. The judges commented that “the passion, playfulness and sparkling prose [in Rundell’s biography of John Donne] seduced all of us. [She] makes an irresistible case for Donne’s work to be widely read 400 years later, for all the electric joy and love it expresses.”

In Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout revisits now-divorced Lucy Barton, the heroine of My Name is Lucy Barton, who sits out the pandemic in Maine with her ex-husband William, who was the subject of Strout’s earlier Oh, William. Lucy By the Sea stands alone on its own merits but will tempt the reader to sample some of Strout’s earlier books including Olive Kitteridge which features a series of connected stories about Olive, a crotchety retired schoolteacher, and the characters whom she encounters throughout her life.

Trust, by Hernan Diaz, is another novel that made the 10-best lists of both the Times and The Washington Post. It depicts the difficult marriage of an ultra-rich couple in early 20th century New York from four fascinatingly different perspectives.

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen. No, it’s not a novel about contemporary Israeli politics – at least not exactly. Instead, it’s a slapstick, laugh-out-loud campus novel set in the 1960s, taking as its point of departure a real-life incident when Benzion Netanyahu (father of Benjamin) brought his whole family to Cornell one winter weekend when he was applying for a teaching position. A surprise winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Even a reader with no interest whatsoever in video games can love Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow! Sam and Sadie meet as youngsters, become creative partners in the world of video game design, and sustain an intense friendship that spans 30 years.

In Fellowship Point, Alice Elliott Dark explores the lifelong friendship between Agnes Lee and her best friend and neighbor Polly Wister, as they struggle in the twilight of their lives over what to do with the coastal peninsula on which they have spent their summers.

Finally, an ultra-local favorite: A Sort of Utopia by Professor Carol O’Connor chronicles the history of Scarsdale from 1891 to 1981. In this Bronx River Books perennial bestseller, you’ll discover an abundance of interesting information about places, personalities, and events in your hometown.