Holiday 2025 book picks for writers, music geeks, puzzle nerds and smarties

As you make your way into the thick of the holiday shopping season, chances are, you’ve had the experience of walking into a bookstore and freezing up. With so many choices lining the shelves, how on earth are you supposed to narrow down your options?

Thankfully, Arizona-based writer and critic Mark Athitakis has some recommendations for the various categories of book lover you may have in your life.

Full conversation

MARK ATHITAKIS: The book I wanted to point to is called “A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction” by Elizabeth McCracken. And I think anybody who goes to a bookstore will see a host of ways to sell your first novel, write your first novel, etc., etc. And they’ll have all sorts of guidance about “you need to write every day,” “you need to do this,” “you need that or the other.”

And I think one thing that’s special about this book by Elizabeth McCracken — who has been nominated multiple times for a National Book Award, she teaches in an MFA program, she knows whereof she speaks — is that the main thing that she gives is a lot of permission. She is not an enthusiast of the idea, “Oh, you must write every day,” or “You must do everything.”

She does have some specific recommendations that are very helpful, but it’s more often drawing from her own failures. So she is a very successful writer, but she is also very candid about the experiences that she has had writing for years on a particular book that just did not get over and why it didn’t. So one thing that any writer has to get used to is the feeling of failure.

SAM DINGMAN: This sounds like such a perfect choice for somebody who is maybe in that headspace where they’re telling themselves like, “I’m not cut out for this. Real writers have a process. I don’t have a process.”

I’m going to not be able to attribute this, but I saw a really great tweet once from a fiction writer who, it was during a period where there was a lot of conversation about Medicaid benefits in Congress, and the phrase “waste, fraud and abuse” was being thrown around.

And this writer was saying, like, those three words should actually be applied to writers because those are actually the cornerstones of a writing process. You’re gonna waste your time writing in directions that you don’t end up going. You’re gonna feel like a fraud, and you’re gonna abuse yourself emotionally.

ATHITAKIS: Yes. Exactly. And I think one nice thing about this book in particular is that I think every writer’s guide has a little bit of a tone to it and attitude it is presenting. I think often of Annie Dillard, who says that if you’re going to be a writer, it is like a blind inchworm struggling to find purchase on the stem of a flower — which is not encouraging, as lovely as Annie Dillard is. So there’s none of that scolding tone in this particular book.

DINGMAN: So let’s move on now, staying in the arts to the ideal selection for the music geek.

ATHITAKIS: Yes. So I think many people would be familiar with the name John Darnielle, who is the really the sole person of the indie folk group the Mountain Goats, which is a very literate, very thoughtful, intellectual but humorous and fun and smart oeuvre that he’s been working on for years.

He started out just making little lo-fi four track tapes and now is a much more sophisticated musician. But he has a real knack for drawing on his life experiences into song. And he has put together a book called “This Year,“ which is a compendium of 365 of his song lyrics, along with personal stories, sometimes about how this particular song came to be, sometimes just about a personal experience and why this song just sort of fits with it.

DINGMAN: And am I right that this is the title of this book is an allusion to his song where the chorus is “I am gonna make it through this year” —

ATHITAKIS: “If it kills me.”

DINGMAN: I am not like a huge Mountain Goats fan or anything, but I have always been fascinated by the degree to which John seems to be able to evoke such a wide range of emotional responses in people. In spite of the fact that his lyrics are so specific to his life. He has a song called the “Best Ever Death Metal Band in” —

ATHITAKIS: “Denton.” East Texas.

DINGMAN: East Texas? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s this hyperspecific story about this death metal band from east Texas. I mean, you listen to that song, and it’s so moving. Even if you have never had any interest in death metal or have never been to Texas, there’s just something about it.

ATHITAKIS: Well, it’s a song about two troubled kids. And John Darnielle's background, before or as he was becoming a singer-songwriter, was working in health care, in psychiatric wards, mainly with children. So he had his own experiences that he talks about. He’s had a front row seat to trauma. He understands that these ideas resonate with people who have had any sort of deep, frustrating feelings in their lives.

DINGMAN: So let’s move on now to your next category. This is the ideal selection for the puzzle nerd in your life.

ATHITAKIS: Yes. So, Natan Last is the author of a book called “Across the Universe,” which is an interesting history of the crossword puzzle. There is a little bit of a culture war that is going on these days when it comes crossword puzzles. What it qualifies as common knowledge? What qualifies as popular knowledge? How do we diversify the crossword?

And Natan Last, who is both a puzzle constructor and a puzzle critic and a historian, talks about how in the 1920s when crosswords first emerged, there was something called the crossword craze. People were obsessed about it. There were moral scolds who were saying that this was brain rot, that this was going to destroy the young minds of American adults and children.

And it reveals that crossword puzzles have a more sophisticated, complicated and deep history than maybe a lot of people think.

DINGMAN: Let’s move on to your final category here, Mark. This is the ideal gift for the smarty in your life.

ATHITAKIS: Yeah. So Ben Schott has put out books for years that kind of deal in kind of pub-quiz esoterica. The fun thing about this particular book, which is called “Schott’s Significa,” is that it is a four color glossy book that deals with the weird private languages of niche groups from Swifties to Starbucks baristas to stuntmen.

For instance, a well performed stunt is called a wreck. He has a whole section that talks about fox hunters and the people who protest the fox hunters, who are called sabs. And they each have their own language about how they discuss not only what they do, but what they are doing in the context of other people.

And it speaks to A, the vibrancy of language, and just the weird sort of humor that people bring to whatever their odd little discipline is.

DINGMAN : One of my favorite little pieces of radio lingo that it took me a really long time to understand despite working in radio for many years is. Do you know the term ax?

ATHITAKIS: I do not.

DINGMAN: OK, so there’s this term ax and tracks, and ax is actualities. So that’s audio that has been gathered out in the field. Let’s say you went to a political rally and you talked to a bunch of the attendees about how they feel about the candidate. Those would be your actualities. And then the tracks would be the narration that you’re writing that strings those actualities together into a story.

So that’s your ax and tracks. And I spent years when people would say, like, “Do we have our ax and tracks for the piece about the JD Vance rally?” I’d be like, “We sure do!” And like, what are they talking about?

ATHITAKIS: It’s weird the sort of things that people pay close attention to. There’s a section about Savile Row tailors who make very, very bespoke clothes. And one term that they have is WFB, which that it is a cut of cloth that is fit for weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs. And I wouldn’t have necessarily thought that there is a specific kind of quality of fabric that is fit for those three in particular, but here we are.

DINGMAN: You’re paying a lot for that garment, but you’re going to be able to use it at multiple events.