A Book Guide For Your Winter Staycation

This year more than ever, the holiday season will be marked by a lack of activity — no more tropical vacations or large family gatherings. Instead, spend this time snuggling down with a mug of hot cocoa and a good book. Here are my top recommendations by genre for your winter staycation.

What we might have dubbed “beach reads” in the before times, I am now rechristening as “effortless reads” for the books’ propulsive plots and mass accessibility. Of course, if you happen to live in a subtropical climate near the ocean, by all means, read these on the beach.

Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuinton

When the First Son of the United States and the Prince of Wales cause a scene at a royal wedding, they are forced to spend time together and pretend to be friends to avoid an international incident. Who knew they’d actually fall in love? Deeply entertaining and hilarious, this book reads as a fanfiction for democracy. McQuinton imagines an alternate universe of liberal fantasies that’ll make you despair for the realities of our politics, but not without also filling you with affection for the characters and a sliver of hope for a future run by today’s savvy young politicos.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Hollywood royalty Evelyn Hugo finally opens up about her life in the spotlight and the seven husbands that are interlaced through the successes and failures of her career. A story of breathtaking love and heartache, Evelyn Hugo is every bit what we imagine in our most idolized celebrities — the good and the bad — but beyond the stardom, she is deeply, tragically human.

How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang

Set in a reimagined Old West during the waning days of the Gold Rush, Chinese American siblings Lucy and Sam carry their father’s body across a sparse and desolate landscape searching for a place to bury him. Zhang dismantles the mythology of the American Dream brick by brick, exposing the intertwined realities of capitalism and racism in a system primed in perceptions of who belongs and who doesn’t. My favorite read this year, I cannot recommend this book enough.

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang

This Black Mirror-esque collection of short stories examines the impact of science and technology on society. Chiang expertly poses deep philosophical questions in stories about Young Earth creationist archeologists and robots that discover they will cause planetary extinction by simply existing and by comparing a society based in oral tradition encountering a written one to a device that records every waking moment: What is truth? What is memory? How do we react when paradigms shift?

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Told from the point of view of Patroclus, an untalented but compassionate young prince in exile who becomes the lifelong companion of Achilles, this new rendering of Homer’s Illiad tells a story of epic love, flawed humanity and cruel fates.

The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans

In this collection, Evans contemplates the ways in which history, both personal and collective, impacts day to day experiences. What stories do we tell about America and its legacy? How does our place in history shape the way we view ourselves and each other? How do we apologize and grieve for a past that stubbornly lives on?

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

Taddeo explores the lives of three real and vastly different women, as well as their expressions of sexuality and the embedded power dynamics within. The incredibly minute details make this book read like a work of fiction and not the meticulously reported story that it is.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

Cullen is one of the foremost experts on mass shootings in America, being the author who wrote Columbine in 2009. Ten years and nearly two hundred school shootings later, Cullen gives us Parkland, a book focused not on the shooting but on the student activists that rose out of it. He tells the story of students who faced immovable politics while also dealing with trauma. Cullen’s sensitivity to the impact of media coverage on the movement reflects the cultural shift in the national dialogue on mass shootings over the past twenty years.

What we here at Outspoken call “straight up” fiction is fiction that defies any specific genre.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Vuong, who is well known in the literary world as a poet, breaks through in a new genre with this intimate and evocative debut novel about a young, queer Vietnamese American man writing a letter to his illiterate mother about all the parts of himself she does not know.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

From a five-star hotel on a remote British Columbian island to the seventeenth floor of a Wall Street office building to a container ship off the coast of Mauritania, St. John Mandel weaves a story of money and moral compromise, ghosts and delusion, and the “kingdom of wealth” that ties disparate parts of the world to each other.

–Kaei Li, Content Creator