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Merry Twixmas, bookworms! (Or merry Feral Week. If you have small children, that description seems more accurate.) I hope you're all having an excellent winter holiday time. Have you gotten any new books recently? I did! Here's what Santa left under the Christmas tree.

Winter Book Haul

The Faithful Executioner: Life And Death, Honor And Shame In The Turbulent Sixteenth Centry by Joel F. Harrington

History Nonfiction

The extraordinary story of a Renaissance-era executioner and his world, based on a rare and overlooked journal.

In the late 1500s a Nuremberg man named Frantz Schmidt began to do something utterly remarkable for his era: he started keeping a journal. But what makes Schmidt even more compelling to us is his day job. For forty-five years, Schmidt was an efficient and prolific public executioner, employed by the state to extract confessions and put convicted criminals to death. In his years of service, he executed 361 people and tortured, flogged, or disfigured hundreds more. Is it possible that a man who practiced such cruelty could also be insightful, compassionate, humane—even progressive?

In his groundbreaking book, the historian Joel F. Harrington looks for the answer in Schmidt’s journal, whose immense significance has been ignored until now. Harrington uncovers details of Schmidt’s medical practice, his marriage to a woman ten years older than him, his efforts at penal reform, his almost touching obsession with social status, and most of all his conflicted relationship with his own craft and the growing sense that it could not be squared with his faith.

A biography of an ordinary man struggling for his soul, The Faithful Executioner is also an unparalleled portrait of Europe on the cusp of modernity, yet riven by conflict and encumbered by paranoia, superstition, and abuses of power.

Why I want to read it: It's so cool that a journal from the 1500s has survived. It sounds completely fascinating. Can you imagine killing 361 people? Can you imagine having a medical practice at the same time? I guess if you know how to fix somebody, you also know how to destroy them. I'm interested to learn how someone becomes and executioner and why. It's a job I'd never do.

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Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Adult Literary Fiction

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Why I want to read it: It keeps winning awards! Also, I read 200+ "Best Books Of 2024" lists. This novel showed up frequently. According to reviewers, it's a darkly funny story about a man trying to uncover a family secret.

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The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

Adult Fantasy

Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people. Thankfully, as a librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she and her assistant, Caz—a magically sentient spider plant—have spent the last decade sequestered among the empire’s most precious spellbooks, preserving their magic for the city’s elite.

When a revolution begins and the library goes up in flames, she and Caz flee with all the spellbooks they can carry and head to a remote island Kiela never thought she’d see again: her childhood home. Taking refuge there, Kiela discovers, much to her dismay, a nosy—and very handsome—neighbor who can’t take a hint and keeps showing up day after day to make sure she’s fed and to help fix up her new home.

In need of income, Kiela identifies something that even the bakery in town doesn’t have: jam. With the help of an old recipe book her parents left her and a bit of illegal magic, her cottage garden is soon covered in ripe berries.

But magic can do more than make life a little sweeter, so Kiela risks the consequences of using unsanctioned spells and opens the island’s first-ever and much needed secret spellshop.

Why I want to read it: Honestly, I was sold when I saw "magically sentient spider plant." That sounds delightfully stupid. The synopsis is giving me Legends & Lattes vibes. I really like that book because it's charming and funny.

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Which books have you gotten recently?