Kicking off #Booksgiving for 2025

I keep doing this in celebration of the joy that books, stories, and reading bring me all 365 days of the year. You'll see if you follow the link just how much pleasure this annual event brings me.

The Icelandic Jólabókaflóð is an annual custom of giving to, recieving from, and reading with, a book to your loved ones on Christmas Eve. I'd love to believe that custom is spreading in 2025 because books are some of the few items inexpensive enough to make sense as gifts in this recession. Even the expensive illustrated books are, comparatively, cheap when tariffs are biting budgets. Over $100 added to the average Yule shopper's 2025 expenditures just for tariffs.

It makes sense to emulate Miss Dolly Parton in giving books to children, every chance you get but particularly when their attention is so highly fractured by everything going on in their world. I've picked some of the most fun-for-me to read and look at picture books as ideas for you to gift to the niblings/grands in your life. Starter links:

Juvenile non-fiction
Juvenile books in total
middle-grade literature.

Their older sibs need reading material, too: YA across genres including our queer youth.

Need something for a guy? A stereotypical gift for a man you don't know well, or one you do and know what lind of STEM reaging he does? A few jumping-off points:
Cars.
Booze/drinking.

Always thinking of the entertainment world? A giftee on your list a music/film fan? Plenty of illustrated gift books to give, ranging from single-song treatises to film-genre studies! Or is there a petrol/gearhead among those you want to spoil? Bet they'll like the single-make studies or the industry-segment overviews on this #Booksgiving list. Celebrity culture.

I'm pretty sure we're all united by our love of The Book, the object that carries stories and information into our heads. Pretty illustrated books about books there are here. Books about books.

Pretty books about the natural world, about the cultures we don't know we don't know about, about gardens, food, drinks, about history...entering a topic in the search box will get you a ton of ideas:
Art books.
Gardens and gardening.

Of course most everyone loves them a mystery, or a thriller. Got y'all covered on those fronts, too: Mystery series.Thriller.

None of these are exhaustive...exhausting, up to you to decide, but incomplete and with the expected enshittified results that our tech masters think are good enough for the likes of us. There are a lot of reviews here, so think of a category, search for it, and very possibly it will turn up useful results. I have tried hard to do that over the past twelve and a half years of reviewing.