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Take pleasure in these fiction picks about gardens and flowers, from the likes of Virginia Woolf and Jessica Francis Kane.

Take pleasure in the joy of making something nourishing and the comfort of convivial authorial company with these go-to cookbooks from the likes of Ina Garten and Edna Lewis.

Beware the charming, social-climbing sociopath! These murderous Machiavellians are a gift to suspense fiction, as they stop at nothing in their ruthless pursuit of success.

What books were read and remained memorable and meaningful in the light of the nightmare of COVID-19? In keeping with the December tradition of the Reader’s Shelf, we asked NYPL librarians to share a favorite title from a year no one will ever forget.

Help your readers navigate the scariest season with a few recent under-the-radar titles that are sure to be crowd pleasers.

For readers looking for silver linings in the dark clouds of COVID-19, cookbooks shine brightly. 

Flowers, ever popular, are enjoying even more admiration at the moment. Help patrons who wish to grow their own do so (at any scale from windowsill to farm) or, as these books also foster, to live a life enriched by the beauty of blooms.

In addition to numerous reference works and self-help books, there are many memoirs and novels dealing with the pervasive and nondiscriminatory disease of addiction. Here are but a few.

Every December, this column gathers the reading (and listening) pleasures of a group of librarians, each willing to share one of the books that brought them great satisfaction in the year nearly gone.