The perfect books to read in December | Cozy Holiday Advent

I believe Before the Coffee Gets Cold falls into the category of books that are best read with little to no knowledge about the story. The less you know going into it, the better. But because this is still a book blog and I am trying to recommend books, I’ll do my best to recommend it without giving too much away about the story.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a Japanese speculative fiction novel about a small café with a unique feature: time travel. The rules are simple, but strict. If someone wishes to travel back to any moment in time, they can sit down at a table and be served a coffee. However: they can only go once and they can’t leave their seat. Nor will it change their present lives. And most importantly: they have to go back to the present before the coffee gets cold.

The rules established in the café create an interesting story that focuses on the human side of sci-fi, which I loved. Every chapter follows a character visiting the café for different reasons. Whether it’s love, grief, heartbreak, friendship or something else, Toshikazu Kawaguchi does a masterful job portraying their feelings and motivations.

It’s one of those stories that will tug on your heartstrings and leave you wondering. If you could go back to see someone one more time, who would you see? What would you say? Lots of time to think about it on a cozy and cold winter night.

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For the last year of my degree, I was so busy and overworked that I read very little. Any books that I did read, were cheesy romances with my favorite tropes, because they were fun and easy to read. I loved doing it and I was glad to get some relaxation in!

But at some point reading the same type of books over and over again began to feel repetitive and all the books just blurred together. It made me so anxious: would I never enjoy reading romance again? Did I ruin this genre for myself? Enter Mariana Zapata: an author I (shockingly) hadn’t heard of yet.

In All Rhodes Lead Here Mariana Zapata shows a masterclass in building tension and developing lovable but occasionally frustrating characters. You will spend 90% of this book wishing these characters would just kiss already, damnit. I went from worrying I could never read another romance again (a true tragedy for any hopeless romantic), to falling in love with the genre all over again.

It features a perfectly executed enemies to lovers set-up, a woman looking for a second chance at life in a small town, a grumpy farmer struggling financially, a meddling kid, and a conveniently timed snowstorm or two. It might not be a full Christmas novel, but it hits every cozy winter read checkbox for me.

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A Snow-White retelling featuring two remarkable women and a world covered in snow, of course this book had to make my December books list for the Cozy Holiday Advent! It’s an incredibly written fantasy novel set in Whitespring, a cold wintery realm, following their queen with a glass heart and the princess made of snow.

Set up against each other, Princess Lynet and Queen Mina are almost doomed to be enemies. Through their perspectives as teenagers – one set in the past, one in the present – we learn about how they ended up where they are. And most importantly: who placed them there.

Girls Made of Snow and Glass takes the tropes of the evil stepmother and the princess/damsel in distress and masterfully subverses them. It questions the narrative of women being pitted against each other, a narrative we unfortunately still see too often today.

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This cute Christmas novella has just about everything you could wish for: delicious pastries, flirty romance, a competition, and a good sense of humor. It’s no wonder that Mangos & Mistletoe is one of my favorite Christmas reads!

Kiskeya and Sully both fly to Scotland with one goal in mind: to win the Holiday Baking Challenge and show everyone they are serious about their baking. Kiskeya is a pastry chef desperately trying to prove her family (and herself) that she can be successful in the culinary world. Whereas Sully is a home chef with no professional experience, hoping to reignite her baking passion after years of being the family caregiver.

They do, of course, not get along when they first meet. And of course, they are teamed up and are forced to work together. They have to work together to reach their goals and for that to happen, they have to get along. And they have to not kiss.

It’s funny, it’s flirty and it’s queer: what could you possibly want more?

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Okay, technically this isn’t really a winter or holiday book, but it starts around Christmas so I’m counting it! I just want an excuse to rave about this book, because Station Eleven always deserves more hype. I read it this year and it quickly cemented itself as one of my favorite reads of the year, possibly even of all time.

Station Eleven is a dystopian novel following several narrators who happened to be in the same theater just before Christmas. There to watch Shakespeare’s King Lear, their lives are forever altered when the lead actor has a heart attack and dies on stage. That same day, a dangerous flu starts to spread internationally. Within weeks, millions of people die and society as we know it falls apart.

Twenty years later, one of the child actors of King Lear is part of a travelling group of Shakespeare actors and musicians, risking their lives to bring art and theater to small communities. Station Eleven is a beautiful exploration of humanity. This is the first dystopian novel that made me feel hopeful. Because despite the disastrous circumstances, there is art. There is community, kindness, and love. All of the narrators in the book are tied together in such inexplicable way. It’s genuinely so beautiful.

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