98 new books coming out November 19, 2024 – January 6, 2025

By Kobo • November 19, 2024New eBooks and Audiobooks

Some of the best books coming out through the 2024 holiday season

As the publishing season slows down for the holidays, the last batch of new books arrives for your reading enjoyment.

2013’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer was a surprise bestseller that introduced readers to indigenous ways of knowing through the perspective of a scientifically-trained botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. More than a decade later, Kimmerer returns with The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, a treatise on living in harmony with the natural world in such a way that one perceives not regulation and conservation, but abundance. Along the same lines Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Wisdom for Collective Well-Being by Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen outlines points of connection between Western knowledge and Indigenous traditions that would build a healthier relationship between humans and the world we depend on for survival. Dr. Kathy Willis’ Good Nature: Why Seeing, Smelling, Hearing and Touching Plants is Good for Our Health comes at the same topic from a skeptical western eye, but arrives at largely the same conclusion concerning a deeply inherent need in humans to live in a thriving natural world.

For another sort of ancient wisdom see Donald J. Robertson’s How to Think Like Socrates: Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World.

Meanwhile high above earthly concerns, the controversy-courting intellectual Jordan B. Peterson returns to the themes of his earliest work with We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine. It’s an examination of the themes woven through biblical stories that he argues underpin foundational psychological principles of western life. He’s joined by Classical scholar Catherine Nixey whose Heretic examines the competing stories about the life of Jesus Christ, and how the story we know now came to prevail over the others.

Speaking of belief, Cher: The Memoir, Part One is the story of the single-named star of music and movies from her childhood up to meeting and marrying her “I Got You Babe” duet partner Sonny Bono.

Keke Palmer, the breakout star of the movie Nope, offers the story of her own life in the form of a book that’s also a guide to writing and living your own story in Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative. We’re not sure yet if it’s too late for Cher to consult Keke for The Memoir, Part Two.

Podcaster Nate DiMeo is a master of all kinds of nonfiction narratives, as he proves (approximately) weekly on The Memory Palace. In under 20 minutes, often a lot less, he brings listeners into a moment, often a very person and easily obscured moment in history. Now in The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past, DiMeo seems to have inadvertently invented a whole new type of writing: nonfiction short stories. We won’t tell you about any of them because the true wonder of The Memory Palace isn’t just DiMeo’s surgical skill at carving out a moment and holding it up to the light, but also not knowing where he’s going to take you this time. Fans of literary fiction who feel like they should read more nonfiction and history should definitely pick this up.

There are two seasons for Christmas romance books: summer and right now. That’s why it’s the perfect time for Iris Visser’s All About Christmas, the story of a workaholic TV producer in line for a big promotion that she suddenly realizes might end up going to her retiring boss’s (admittedly very attractive) son. Lights, camera, action ensues.

We’ve covered a lot of nonfiction here and a tiny bit of Christmas fiction tinsel: but there’s a lot of new fiction as well, including new books by Haruku Murakami, Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson, and more.