I’m the Strategist Bibliophile. These Are the Best Books to Gift.

As I said above, this is my go-to book gift this season. It’s a slim, efficient novel, a little over 200 pages, that’s about a prominent Black church family living in Mississippi grappling with the sins of their youngest son. It’s quick but not breezy and has some of the best characterization I’ve read outside of Toni Morrison. What I like most about the novel is that it uses the frame of this family secret to talk about early-2000s culture and the social mores that keep us all bound. I think anyone can appreciate it, including the friend who barely reads.

Toni Morrison’s second novel follows two girls in an all-encompassing friendship that eventually dissolves after a betrayal. I read it following my own and ended up feeling empathy for us both.

Fact-checker Jack Denton recommendsRun the Song, a meditation on the relationship between music and movement. Music critic Ben Ratliff, who previously wrote about jazz for the New YorkTimes, started noticing how running opened up his understanding of a song.Run the Songis the product of that evolution and encompasses a wide range of songs — from Ice Spice to ’70s soul.

For your friend who’s always talking about AI, senior editor Julie Kosin recommendsEmpire of AI.The author, Karen Hao, is an investigative journalist who has been covering OpenAI since 2019, when safety was a core part of its mission. The book offers an eyewitness view of the past half-decade and the company defining our era. Sam Altman’s onetime nonprofit is behind ChatGPT, a chatbot that has blown open our culture and raised concerns about the impact of AI on our climate. Hao doesn’t stop there, though. She digs deep to comprehensively chronicle its impact, from how it’s affecting Silicon Valley to Chilean water activists.

New YorkMagazine staffer Bridget Read is the author ofLittle Bosses Everywhere,which deep dives into the world of multilevel marketing, pyramid schemes masquerading as legitimate companies (think Mary Kay and Amway) while ensnaring millions of people. This is the first book to document its evolution, beginning with a failed salesman starting a vitamin business to its present iteration, where there are stadium-size conventions filled with people preaching the gospel of direct marketing.

Roger Deakins is the cinematographer behindBlade Runner: 2049, Fargo, andNo Country for Old Menand widely considered one of the greatest of all time. This autobiography comes recommended by film critic Bilge Ebiri and offers a look at Deakins’s life as well as his process, documenting his relationship from his early days shooting music videos to his longtime collaboration with filmmakers like the Coen brothers.

And for those feeling less than optimistic about the direction of cinema, features writer Emily Gould recommendsLast Week in End Times Cinema, which documents every bad thing that happened in the film industry from March 2024 to March 2025.

“A lot of people have always meant to read it, and if you give it to them, they have no excuse,” says Gould ofOld Filth,which she describes as “peak reading pleasure.” The book is a tragicomedy about a judge coming to terms with the death of his wife. If that doesn’t sound titillating, read it anyway. Gould says it’s “fantastic in a way that a description of its plot could never do justice.”

Features writer Rebecca Jennings recommends gifting a copy ofWuthering Heightsbefore the latest film adaptation comes out in 2026 “so you can refresh yourself to get the maximum amount of annoyed at Emerald Fennell’s interpretation.” Emily Brontë’s only novel is a love story about two wealthy landowning families and their relationship with one’s racially ambiguous foster son, Heathcliff. Even though it was published in the late 1800s, the novel continues to captivate readers rooting for Catherine and Heathcliff.

“I give Emily Hahn to women who think they’ve read every cool gal of the past,” says Curbed writer Adriane Quinlan. Hahn was a journalist who wrote over 50 books and traveled widely, writing extensively about her experiences abroad. Her most popular work is arguably her memoir,China to Me, which chronicles China in the ’30s and ’40s and documents the sociopolitical climate through a deeply personal perspective, a style of journalism later adopted by writers like Joan Didion.

A look back at the advent and rise of Barneys from the perspective of its heir, Gene Pressman. Pressman is the grandson of the store’s founder, and he helped transform the brand to the global phenomenon and uniquely New York institution it’s remembered as. This insider account takes readers behind the scenes — to backroom negotiations with Savile Row tailors and cafés in Paris — and into the rise and fall of a store that once seemed eternal.

Culture writer Cat Zhang says theNew York Review of Booksreissue ofJack the Modernistwould make the perfect gift. The novel is set in the early ’80s and is about the slow dissolution of a love affair. TheNYRBdescribes it as “sensual as well as sensational, self-conscious, but never self-serious.”

North Sun, a National Book Award finalist, is a favorite of features writer Kerry Howley. It’s about a whaling crew’s voyage to the Chukchi Sea. The crew starts out confident and even plans to hunt on their way, but things become more strange as the journey unfolds. Like all epic novels about voyages, it’s about the sea but also interested in bigger concepts like extraction and environmental exploitation.