📚🎁 StrongWithDana’s Gift Guide for Readers ✨

You didn't think I was done recommending gifts, did you?

🔥 Community First

❄️ December 17th is the Alley After Work, a happy hour social featuring DJ Old Skool at Bassline Chicago.

❄️December 18th, check out the 40+ Queer Winter Mixer at Nobody's Darling, from 6:30 to 10pm.

Happy Friday, Friends!

If you ask me, books make excellent gifts. They’re personal, thoughtful, easy to ship, and perfect for cozy winter nights. You can add a personal touch with a handmade bookmark or note in the first few pages. It’s like giving an item and an experience at the same time.

So I’ve created a gift guide just for the readers, organized by the type of reader in your life and with the addition of some great local spots to check out for more bookish gift ideas. Every entry on this list has a Bookshop.org link so you can support local anyway, but don't miss the chance to go to one of the physical shops I listed!

Happy gifting and happy reading!

🧡 For the friend who loves variety

📚 Check out the Haymarket Gift Bundles, where you can get 5 books for $55.

These are organized by topics, including justice in Palestine, fighting fascism, empire issues, and abolition. There are 11 to choose from!

🌻 For a local community experience

📚 My friend Fran is hosting a book club this season at Crema Shop on Wilson!

We're reading nonfiction and seeking new members. Go with a friend for a community experience, which is priceless. The next one is mid-January, and there's more info here. Email info@shopcrema.com to join!

📚 Time and a Half Books, Ravenswood

Wish this new local bookshop a warm welcome and pay them a visit! Time and a Half just opened here in Ravenswood, and I couldn't be more excited to have a new member of the local book community.

📚 The Last Chapter Bookshop, Roscoe Village

This romance-only bookstore is for the lovers! They have tons of book-themed gifts, like totes and candles, plus a huge range of romance books in every sub-genre you can imagine.

📚 Heirloom Books, Andersonville

This is a cozy little gem in Aville offering used books and endless nooks and crannies to look through. Myopic who?

🧡 For the Friend Who Loves Gender and Sexuality Literature

📚 All About Love, by bell hooks

Provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society stricken with lovelessness—not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love. 

📚 Stag Dance, by Torrey Peters

In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

🌻 For the Neighbor Who Loves Chicago + Cultural Topics

📚 Chicago Homes, by Carla Bruni and Phil Thompson, with illustrations by Wonder City Studio

A city famous for its architecture--and for arguing with New Yorkers about who built it first and best--now has a definitive guide to the unique housing types and styles that have inspired so much devotion. This book is for curious Chicagoans and visitors alike--anyone who's ever wondered how to spot a Foursquare or where to find Italianate homes from before the Great Chicago Fire.

📚 Unabridged: The Thrill of and Threat to the Modern Dictionary, by Stefan Fatsis

Fatsis reveals the little-known story of how the brothers George and Charles Merriam acquired Noah Webster's original American dictionary and reshaped the business of language forever. Merriam-Webster became America's most successful and enduring compendium of words, withstanding intense competition and cultural controversies – only to be threatened by the power of Google and artificial intelligence today.

❄️ For the Friend Who Knows the Health and Wellness Industry is Broken

📚 Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, by Kate Mann

Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates—how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person’s attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression.

📚 Mind the Science: Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry, by Jonathan N Stea

A clinical psychologist who regularly deals with some of society's most vulnerable exposes and debunks the predatory pseudoscience and grift of the multi-trillion-dollar wellness industry and points us towards a better way to take care of our mental health.

📚 Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, by Virginia Sole-Smith

Kids learn, as we’ve all learned, that thinness is a survival strategy in a world that equates body size and value. Parents worry if their kids care too much about being thin, but even more about the consequences if they aren’t. And multibillion-dollar industries thrive on this fear of fatness. We’ve fought the “war on obesity” for over forty years and Americans aren’t thinner or happier with their bodies. But it’s not our kids—or their weight—who need fixing.

📚 Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker

Since May 2020, Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker have used their Conspirituality podcast to expose countless facets of the intersection of alt-health practitioners with far-right conspiracy trolls. Now this expansive and revelatory book unpacks the follies, frauds, cons and cults that dominate the New Age and wellness spheres and betray the trust of people who seek genuine relief in this uncertain age.

Happy gifting!

With you as we curl up with a good book,
Dana