This holiday season, there’s nothing better you can give your favorite overworked journalist than a good book, with a note attached exhorting him or her to get off the screen and curl up on the couch instead.
Last year’s winter reading list from our readers included classics like Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check, and newer selections, like The Lonely Soldier by Helen Benedict and Hella Nation by Evan Wright. This past summer, Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists—a darkly comic novel tracing tracing a fictional English-language newspaper in Rome through its slow decline—topped the list as most recommended by our commenters.
So what do you suggest this time around? Feel free to recommend more than one great read: fiction, nonfiction, history, memoir—we’re all ears.
The Editors are the staffers of the Columbia Journalism Review.