2025
The sensible thing would be to spend December hawking my own books on social media, as that’s what you’re supposed to do during this annual consumer frenzy. But I’ve spent the month creating a gift guide for other authors’ work instead. That just feels more in the spirit of the season and nicer for my brain overall, to be honest. So here is a bookish December gift guide, except it’s books I love by authors I adore!
If you need gift ideas for collectors of strange facts and stranger passions, for readers who want their beauty served with darkness, their scholarship seasoned with the supernatural. For friends who see magic in the margins and find wisdom in the weird, and follow mystery wherever it leads! Well, maybe you will find something here for them…
Worlds Beyond Time by Adam Rowe a stunning gallery-in-a-book celebrating 1970s sci-fi art in all its trippy, hyperrealistic, cosmically awe-inspiring glory. Skeletons (and dolphins!) in spacesuits, cities sealed under geodesic domes, emperors dressed like otherworldly Popes, lonely astronauts whose helmet reflections contain entire alien landscapes—all the dazzling weirdness that made this era of genre illustration so wonderfully bizarre and unforgettable.
Essential for retrofuturistic dreamers, anyone who’s ever stared at a vintage paperback cover and felt their synapses light up with starfire, lasers, and demented glee.
Little Hidden Doors by Naomi Sangreal guides us through a luminous sanctuary for exploring the mysteries of our sleeping minds. Sangreal, a psychotherapist and intuitive guide, weaves Jungian psychology with creative prompts (writing, collage, meditation) making complex concepts like shadow work and anima integration accessible without losing their depth. Her approach treats nightmares as messengers rather than threats, offers practical guidance on lucid dreaming, and frames paying attention to our dreams as a radical act, a rejection of wake-centricity, a subversive reclamation of the nocturnal. The artwork throughout is gorgeous and serves as inspiration for your own visual dreamwork. My copy is heavily annotated, margins filled with insights, and it’s become one of my most frequently recommended books.
Essential for anyone ready to move beyond transcription into actual dreamwork, for people building intentional practices around their inner lives, and for those seeking what emerges when you start opening those hidden doors.
Salt Is for Curing by Sonya Vatomsky, a book I have purchased and given away more times than I can count. When I first read this collection, it took all that I had not to devour it in one greedy instant. I feared that to do so, to ingest all of these potent magics at once, would give me a terribly heartsick sort of heartburn and yet leave me with the very worst sort of emptiness, knowing there is no more to be had. I drew it out for as long as I could stand.
Sonya writes about folklore and the body, curses and cures, salt and blood. Poetry that reads like spells. Essential for readers who seek the ritual in the repast, who recognize the grimoire in a constellation of scars and the deep bear growl of the belly, that memory and personal folklore isn’t precious, it’s raw and bleeding, a sandwich of wounds seasoned with tears and duck fat and ticklish sprigs of tragic forest herbs; that the mouth is where curses live alongside prayers, that to eat is to invoke and to speak is to consume, swallow your tongue or spit it out.
What does any of that mean? I don’t even know. My word salad tribute to a dear friend, an incredible writer, and a beautiful weirdo poet without peer.
Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom. Medical historian and biblio-adventurer Megan Rosenbloom’s investigation of books bound in human skin doesn’t just reveal details about the anthropodermic books, or the collectors who greedily hoarded them, or the craftspeople who created them; she passionately and humanely explores the people these books used to be.
Along the way we learn of gentleman doctors in their mahogany-shelved libraries, flaunting strange collections; the gruesome and clandestine theatrics of midnight corpse-thieving grave robbers, midwives to royalty, 19th-century highwaymen in their final hours, poets and paupers, murderers and scientists. This book is deeply intersectional, touching on gender, race, socioeconomics, and the Western medical establishment’s colonialist mindset. Come for the weird books facts, stay for the unexpected and powerful human questions.
Essential for death-positive weirdos, librarians with morbid curiosities, anyone who’s ever wondered about bodily consent across centuries, readers who want their macabre served with ethics and empathy, and those who’ve ever wondered what should happen to their own skin after they’re done with it.
Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones by Hettie Judah Have you ever gazed into a stone and wondered as to the stories it stores? The powers it possesses? Hettie Judah explores the hidden history of these lithic marvels in Lapidarium, from their role in ancient cultures to their modern-day influences and uses. An absolute feast for the senses, the book itself feels like a collector’s treasure, a hoarded wunderkammer of mythic and mysterious curiosities.
Sixty stones, each with imaginative descriptions and wild stories. The Meat-Shaped Stone of Taiwan (banded jasper that resembles braised pork belly). Pele’s Hair (golden strands of volcanic glass spun by volcanic gasses). Angel-appointed wife swaps in alchemist John Dee’s smoky quartz cairngorm. The TikTok moldavite craze. From emerald moons to fossilized feces, from violent lunar origin stories to simple earthen pigments—Hettie writes with humor, compassion, and wit (I cackled out loud more times than I can count).
Essential for anyone who hoarded gemstones in Splendor like a greedy dragon, for people who made a beeline to the mineral rooms at natural history museums, for readers who want their geology served with soap opera drama and alchemical WTFery, and for those who need a weird rock fact to lodge in their brain like a wayward pebble in their shoe to guide their energies for the day.
Witch Hunt: A Traveler’s Guide to the Power and Persecution of the Witch by Kristen Sollée. A hybrid travel guide and memoir that dips into historical fiction, this book reflects research gleaned from travels to seven countries, forty-five cities, towns, and villages. Kristen, a second-generation witch, explores the fraught and fascinating history of these haunting figures from the past and uncovers how the archetype of the witch has been reclaimed as a symbol of power.
We learn of the trauma and tragedy baked into the history of these places, but also how they’ve resurrected and reclaimed this archetype for commerce, community, and activism. Her descriptions of the locations and spaces she spends time in bubble with intensely curious spirit, wicked sharp observations, and expansive, imaginative storytelling—with an eye toward both the sensitivity crucial to conversations about these archetypes and the actual people involved in these histories, all balanced with an irrepressible sense of humor and appreciation for the absurd. Kristen is indisputably at the height of both her writerly and witchly powers.
Essential for witches seeking their lineage, for travelers who want their history alive with magic and fury, for readers who understand that reclaiming dangerous archetypes is its own form of spellwork, and for anyone who’s ever wondered how persecution becomes liberation becomes tourist attraction becomes revolution.
The Magical Writing Grimoire by Lisa Marie Basile is part guided journaling practice, part interactive magical grimoire. It explores writing as a transformative tool for magic, manifestation, and ritual. Lisa Marie Basile approaches writing as both occult practice and craft, half channeling from something electric and cosmic, half chiseling that raw transmission into shape through years of training and intentional work.
Each chapter contains writing prompts woven with magical ritual and tools: working with crystals, spell incantation, candle alchemy, moon phases, bibliomancy, shadow work, automatic writing. You’ll learn to create a personal grimoire of self-rituals and intentions, to write letters to your deepest self without censorship or judgment, to use water and rest as sacred recharge, to resist the linear when intuition calls for scattered poem-spells hidden in purses and tucked on altars. Lisa understands that the grand ritual is returning to sacred moments again and again, that process-oriented magic, the long game of healing old traumas and identifying patterns, leads to massive shifts in joy, health, and abundance. That through writing, we can reclaim our pain, take ownership of our stories, and understand that the word itself is eternal and a wand we’ve been carrying all along.
Essential for writers who sense there’s magic in the marks they make, for those who need to hear that the voice blooms at its own pace, for those who want permission to show up wholly themselves with all the conundrums and strangeness of the human condition, and for anyone who understands that writing is communication with something deeper than readership—with the self, with mystery, with whatever lives at the bottom of the well.
Death’s Garden, Revisited: Personal Relationships with Cemeteries edited by Loren Rhoads. A gathering of tapophilic musings from all walks of life—genealogists and geocachers, travelers and tour guides, academics and amateur sleuths explore the culture, zeitgeist, landscape, philosophy, and history of cemeteries, as well as the stories of the people, both infamous and obscure, buried there.
Told from thrillingly diverse voices spanning the globe from Iceland to Argentina, from Portland to Prague, these writings illustrate one author’s observation that “once we escape from the bony grip of mortality, we find common ground.” We read stories of joy and mirth: first dates, weddings, reunions, ghost tours. We also read of sadness and rage and things vile and unconscionable: vandalism, desecration, racism, revolutions, murders. We read over and over of the peace to be found at the end of all things. That despite their eerie and unsettling associations with ghosts and the supernatural, despite being thought of as bleak, gloomy places, the taboo nature of their existence—well, as one writer declares, “That’s not scary, it’s family.”
I read this book at a snail’s pace, one essay a day, and I think that might be the best way to take in these stories. Reading about death is intense and heavy—grave subject matter, if you’ll pardon the pun. I found myself either delicately weepy or hiccuping with unexpected sobs after quite a few of them. It’s a profoundly affecting, powerfully beautiful collection.
Essential for cemetery wanderers seeking solitude, for anyone who’s ever felt more at peace among gravestones than crowds, for readers who understand that cemeteries are spaces outside of time where the living and the dead find common ground, and for those who know that the quietest places on earth hold the loudest truths about love, memory, and our own fragile, brief lives.
Weird Liza’s Colorama: Vol. 001: Fantastical Creatures, Beasts and Other Nonsense by Liza Rein. Here’s a thing about me: coloring books usually trigger my anxiety. It feels too high stakes somehow, even though I’m literally just filling in lines someone else drew. But something about the weird whimsy and gentle fever dream phantasmagoria of these creatures—I mean, the title has “nonsense” right in the name—put me at ease straight away. “We’re all strange and silly friends here,” they seemed to burble and clack at me, “come on in!”
Twenty trippy hand-illustrated pages of delightful fancy and furry friends, feeling dark, weird, bizarre, or abstract, and this coloring book will not judge. Two hours disappeared while I watched TV and spilled my anxieties onto the page, letting them mingle with the ink, and before I knew it I had a streaky purple bird-wizard conjuring up shadows. My fingers stained in a kaleidoscope of hues, breathing in the quiet hum of something that feels a lot like creativity. A wacky alchemical act transforming unease into art.
Essential for anyone whose hands need a rest from their usual craft, for people who find standard coloring books too precious and need permission to be weird, for readers who can’t just sit and watch TV without doing something with their hands, and for those ready to exorcise the anxiety demons in a wonderland of nonsense.
Murder Ballads: Illustrated Lyrics & Lore by Katy Horan. Ever since I first heard Ceoltoiri’s haunting version of “The Cruel Sister” on their Women of Ireland CD 25 years ago, I’ve been haunted by that moment when “the harp began to play alone”—those goosebumps still chill me every single time. Katy Horan’s Murder Ballads feels like the perfect companion to that long fascination. She brings together beautifully unsettling illustrations with meticulous research into twenty traditional murder ballads and their real-world origins. She doesn’t just retell these dark stories but excavates their histories, tracing how some songs evolved from actual murders while others spring from pure folklore and mythic tradition.
Her approach is both scholarly and sensitive, restoring humanity to victims often reduced to cautionary tales while examining the genre’s troubling roots in patriarchal violence and white supremacy. Each ballad entry includes recommended recordings, making this as much a gateway into the music as it is a cultural study. Horan’s art has a strange, folkloric beauty: darkly whimsical but never twee, weaving folk tradition and rustic charm alongside a gothic sensibility touched by shadow and mystery. A quality of illuminated manuscripts crossed with old Appalachian almanacs and herbalist guides.
Essential for anyone who’s ever gotten goosebumps from a murder ballad, for readers drawn to the darker threads of folk tradition, for those who want their music history served with cultural critique and gorgeous art, and for anyone who understands how real tragedy and timeless myth both become song.
Visual Alchemy: A Witch’s Guide to Sigils, Art & Magic by Laura Tempest Zakroff. Since the dawn of human creativity, magic and art have been deeply, powerfully intertwined. But somewhere in the midst of that conversation sits me—and others like me, I’m sure—excited by this idea, sensing that we have both art and magic in our souls, but not having the faintest idea how to unlock this potential, how to even begin to “do the thing.” “Arting” when you’re not an “artist” is a terrifying prospect!
Laura expands on her signature sigil witchery method, guiding us through exercises and practices to move past our fears and trust our intuition. We explore and grow and create meaning and magic from the shapes and symbols and patterns we find within, weaving these elements together, imbuing them with intent, creating something wholly, uniquely ours alone. Everything around us has a pattern. We find layers of meaning encoded in how shapes and symbols dance forth from our hands. Through art, we are communicating with the divine as much as we are discovering ourselves.
Essential for anyone who senses they have art and magic in their souls but doesn’t know how to begin, and for those ready to discover that the doing itself is the thing, the work, the spell.
Symbolorum: The Secret Wisdom of Emblems by Mandy Aftel. Giant hands reach from the sky to pluck flowers while spiders spin their webs and frogs have spa days. Lions gambol past village churches and platters heap with abundant fruit. Dragons contemplate their visage in mirrors. Camels recline in repose. Snakes eat their own tails. Swans do a funny little wiggling dance! Each small, round engraving contains an entire world mid-story, frozen in some strange dramatic moment, accompanied by a Latin motto that reveals timeless wisdom drawn from Aesop, Ovid, medieval bestiaries, and a worldview in which human lives are tangled with plants, animals, the moon, and the stars.
Natural perfumer Mandy Aftel spent decades reading antique books of botanical illustrations and aromatic lore, discovering not just recipes for perfume but an older vision of the natural world threaded with magic and mystery. When she encountered Joachim Camerarius’s Symbolorum et Emblematum from the 1590s, she recognized something extraordinary: a cosmos where nature was animate and instructive, where every creature held wisdom, where everything spoke in symbols. She acquired an original 1654 edition, translated the Latin texts, selected 100 emblems to illuminate with watercolor, and wove her own insights through Camerarius’s meditations on existence.
Emblems share tarot’s symbolic language, speaking not to your rational mind but to your intuitive and emotional self, pairing image, motto, and meditation to convey timeless wisdom about how to navigate life. Knowledge that moves through the body as much as the intellect. Open to a page at random every morning, let the image and its wisdom guide your day. Today, a hairy leg descends from the heavens to tromp on something that kinda looks like a bunch of garlic bulbs, PULCHRIOR ATRITA RESURGO—I rise again more beautiful for being crushed. Well then. Maybe being ground down isn’t the end of things? Maybe this bruising is exactly where the blooming happens? Bibliomantic wisdom for the day!
Essential for anyone hungry for a less rational understanding of the natural world, for readers drawn to uncover ancient wisdom where everything in the cosmos connects, for those who love old books and tarot and understand that symbols engage us in seeking beyond linear reason, and for anyone who recognizes the transformative power held in these curious circular images.
Magic Maker: The Enchanted Path to Creativity by Pam Grossman explores creativity and magic as inseparable forces: spellcasting and invocation, divination and spirit communication, all in service of making whatever it is you’re meant to make. A song, a novel, a path through this strange world.
She writes about preparatory rituals and consciousness-shifting, about anointment and adornment and alter egos, about the tingly sensation of being “activated” when Big Inspiration strikes. About how chaos must shimmer behind the veil of order—the way the back of embroidered work is a riot of tangled threads and knots, what I call “the nightmare side” of any pristine creative surface. Her references range from Remedios Varo to Orville Peck, from Chelsea Wolfe to Beyoncé to Prince, from David Lynch talking about catching big fish in the depths to André Breton insisting that all art is magical in its genesis. She describes ekphrasis as speaking out about a piece of art and adding your own embellishments through unique interpretation, which made me sit up and think: that’s exactly how I write about art. Magic, she says, is an intentional means of collaborating with Creative Force to transform a state of being, and creativity is the truest expression of our magic. They’re the ouroboros eating its tail, the lemniscate looping forever—two sides of the same sparkling coin, flipped and spinning through infinite possibility.
I haven’t finished this book yet. Normally I would wait until the end before writing about anything, and there was that familiar pull to rush through it, to consume it all at once so I could discuss it properly and give you the full picture. But I wanted to include it in this gift guide while it’s still timely, and I think it’s actually more helpful to write about a book like this in stages because it is teeming with insight and revelations. There’s so much here to absorb and sit with. I can always come back and write more later. But I prefer to experience Pam’s books parceled out more slowly, letting each idea land and resonate before moving to the next, giving them space to breathe and bloom and burrow their way through my wriggly brain noodles, setting off sparks and lighting up pathways and making unexpected connections.
I’ve been in awe of Pam’s work for what feels like forever now; she’s been a continual source of inspiration, and what she does thrills me to the deepest gloops of my marrow. We’ve known each other online for nearly twenty years, fellow travelers on similar creative wavelengths, sharing the same fascination with where art and magic collide. Her words have this particular power to bewitch and transport, to ensorcell you completely, leaving you utterly immersed and somehow changed. I trust her to take me places both wondrous and magical.
Essential for anyone who’s ever felt that tingle beneath their skin when inspiration strikes, for those who understand that getting out of your own way means making space for something grander to move through you, for anyone who wants to see their tangled nightmare-side threads as proof of magic working rather than evidence of mess, and for those ready to remember that making and magic have always been the same shimmering, infinite thing.
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