For those of us who put off holiday gift shopping, it can be hard to figure out what to get our loved ones in a pinch. This list offers twenty-three of the best books of 2021—with a couple of guest appearances from 2020—categorized to fit the needs of almost anyone.
The Foodie
Cal Peternell, Burnt Toast and Other Disasters (HarperCollins)
The Activist
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, My Monticello (Henry Holt)
The Traveler
Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation (Berkley)
The Ghost Story Lover
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence: A Novel (HarperCollins)
The Observer
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (Knopf)
The Astronomer
Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary (Ballantine)
The Historian
Neal Gabler, Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932–1975 (Crown)
The True-Crime Buff
Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (HarperCollins)
The Linguist
Amanda Montrell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language (Harper Wave)
The Memoirist
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Knopf)
The Philosopher
Richard Powers, Bewilderment (W. W. Norton)
The Psychologist
Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking outside the Brain (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The Scientist
Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World, trans. Adrian Nathan West (Pushkin Press)
The Writer
Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot: A Novel (Celadon)
The Poet
Rita Dove, Playlist for the Apocalypse (W. W. Norton)
The New Yorker
Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation (Simon & Schuster)
The Musical Theater Nerd
James Lapine, Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Feminist
Audrey Clare Farley, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt (Grand Central)
The Essayist
John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet (Dutton)
The Archaeologist
Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art (Bloomsbury Sigma)
The Former Athlete
Alison Bechdel, The Secret to Superhuman Strength (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The Actor
Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle: A Novel (Knopf)
The Existentialist
Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking about This (Riverhead Books)