BOOKS IN HANDS • What Readers Bought During Holidays 2019

You ever want to know what people are buying in bookstores? Well, it so happens that I work at one, and I wanted to write about what books customers have been asking for during the holiday season.

All bookstores are different, so the customers coming in ask for different things. These are just the books the customers in my area asked for during the past week leading up to the Holidays in 2019.

This list isn’t a conclusive list; the books here are the ones that I’ve remembered because I’ve been asked about it a bazillion times or I’ve seen customers holding it.

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry | The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapowski* | The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates | There There by Tommy Orange* | Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott | The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead* | The Overstory by Richard Powers* | The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton | The Institute by Stephen King

Dog Man: Fetch-22 by Dav Pilkey | Guts by Raina Telgemeier | Little Legends: Exceptional Men in Black History by Vashti Harrison | Thunderhead (Scythe series #2) by Neal Shusterman* | Wrecking Ball (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #14) by Jeff Kinney

Beware the Kitten Holy (Lumberjanes Vol. 1) by by Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Brooke A. Allen, & Shannon Watters | Tales from a Not-So-Best Friend Forever (Dork Diaries #14) by Rachel Renee Russell | Sulwe by Lupita Nyong’o & Vashti Harrison | he Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson #1) by Rick Riordan | Best Friends by Shannon Hale

Me by Elton John | Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham | No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg | The American Story: Conversations with Master Historian by David M. Rubenstein | Modern Witch Tarot Deck by Lisa Sterle

Nothing Fancy by Alison Roman | Fancy AF Cocktails by Ariana Madix & Tom Sandoval | From Crook to Cook by Snoop Dogg* | Binging with Babish by Andrew Rea*

Gordon Ramsay’s Home Cooking by Gordon Ramsay | The Berkeley Bowl Cookbook by Laura McLively* | East Bay Cooks by Carolyn Jung | Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat

(Everything with an asterisk next to it are books that were sold out early on during the Christmas weekend.)

Tis the season for cookbooks! I noticed it a lot more this year, and maybe it’s because people weren’t asking for Ottolenghi’s new book or Salt Fat Acid Heat. The popular cookbooks were Nothing Fancy and Fancy AF. (Kind of funny that they both have “Fancy” in their titles.)

The books for The Witcher series was completely empty. (Definitely shows you that people have become interested because of the TV show, or Henry Cavill, whichever.) Also, lots of parents and teens were asking for the Scythe series, particularly the second book Thunderhead, which we sold out early in the holiday weekend.

Lots of customers came in without a specific book in mind, so it was fun, trying to find books that would be great gifts. Not all customers are alike, so my recommendations change depending on the person’s interest. Off the top of my head, for those customers, my go-to recommends were:

Kids/Teens: Any books by Katherine Applegate, Tristan Strong Punches A Hole In the Sky by Kwame Mbalia, Aru Shah by Roshani Chokshi, Sofia Valdez, Future Prez by Andrea Beaty
Comics: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki, On A Sunbeam by Tillie Walden, Lumberjanes
Fiction: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Non-Fiction: I didn’t recommend a lot of nonfiction books.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of books that I’ve recommended. This holiday season was super busy, and I spent a lot of time helping the cashier ring up customers. Now I can try to decompress, but yknow tis the time for returns.