7 Books You Should Maybe Consider Buying on Black Friday

From LOCAL bookstores only

Overconsumption and consumerism will prooooobably be the end of us all. That is if, ya know, the next four years don’t take us out first. However, I am simply a slut for tangible reading material and have yet to succumb to the temptation of the Amazon Kindle. Jeff Bezos is spooky, greedy, AND bald. Like, pick a struggle.

Anyway, because of this, I hit up my local bookstore, Changing Hands, to get my analog reading fix as much as possible—and will be doing so from Black Friday through Cyber Monday. If you’re lucky enough to live close to a local bookstore, I suggest you do the same. These places are so important for our communities, and their pockets are worth lining.

Here’s a list you can bring with you this weekend if you’re in a reading slump and feel overwhelmed when face-to-face with the Dewey Decimal System. There are seven because ten felt too overwhelming but five felt too unambitious. I’ve read them all and would never dream of steering you wrong.

Happy reading, happy holidays, happy consuming. I love ya.

1. Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
   Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own.

2. Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
   Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds.

3. Black Swans by Eve Babitz
   Black Swans is a collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s—decades of dreams, drink, and stoned youth turning Republican. Babitz prowls California, telling tales of a changing world. She writes about the Rodeo Gardens, about AIDS, about learning to tango, about the Hollywood Cemetery, about the self-enchanted city, and, most important, about the envy and jealousy underneath it all.

4. Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion
   A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader.

5. The Secret History by Donna Tart
   Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.

6. The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
   King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. He has laid the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world.

7. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
   For years Carmen Maria Machado has struggled to articulate her experiences in an abusive same-sex relationship. In this extraordinarily candid and radically inventive memoir, Machado tackles a dark and difficult subject with wit, inventiveness and an inquiring spirit, as she uses a series of narrative tropes—including classic horror themes—to create an entirely unique piece of work which is destined to become an instant classic.