Local Booksellers Share Holiday Reads and Gift Recs

Whether you still need a gift for the bookworm on your list or are one yourself, Boston-area indies have you covered. Below, see what the folks at Harvard Book Store, Brookline Booksmith, and brand-new shop Papercuts JP recommend you check out this winter break.

HARVARD BOOK STORE

HBS shares their staff recommendations online all year round, but for this holiday season, another online shelf to explore is their Holiday Hundred, a collection of great books in all genres, from Susanna Kaysen’s Cambridge and B.J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures, to Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, to memoirs by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Elizabeth Warren—who both spoke at Harvard Book Store this year.

Bonus: every book on HBS’s Holiday Hundred is currently 20 percent off.

BROOKLINE BOOKSMITH

The Coolidge Corner favorite has been sharing their gift recommendations throughout the month in the categories of kids’, cooking, and art and literature books.

Suggestions for kids and teens range from picture books like Naoko Stoop’s Red Knit Cap Girl and the Reading Tree to young adult books like Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun. Cookbook recs include Jeremy Sewall’s The New England Kitchen and—best cookbook title ever—Thug Kitchen: The Official Cookbook: Eat Like You Give a F*ck. Art and literature book recommendations include 101 Two Letter Words by Stephen Merritt, illustrated by Roz Chast; and travel book recommendations include Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands and Hide and Seek: The Architecture of Cabins and Hideouts by Sofia Borges, Sven Ehmann, and Robert Klanten.

The Booksmith also includes gift suggestions from their store-within-a-store, The Giftsmith.

PAPERCUTS JP

Kate Layte’s new store opened this year on Small Business Saturday in Jamaica Plain, and the neighborhood welcomed Papercuts with open arms.

Among her holiday recommendations for you and yours: The Best American Infographics 2014 edited by JP resident Gareth Cook, Anya Ulinich’s Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, and Jim Botticelli’s Dirty Old Boston.

Layte’s favorite read of the year is Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. by Viv Albertine, which she describes as “a new autobiography by the guitarist of The Slits and my personal heroine. Utterly unputdownable… Accompany with her 2012 solo release The Vermilion Border and pick up a vinyl of Cut for a trifecta of badassery.”