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10 Books That Make EXCELLENT Christmas Gifts
Matt Karamazov
December 09, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 43 minutes
Putting together my Christmas Book List is one of my favorite things to do.
And I don’t mean the recommendations in this newsletter - although I do love writing this newsletter for you too!
No, I mean my own Christmas wish list! Throughout the year, I maintain a list of books that I want to read (separated into “High Priority,” “Mid Priority,” and “Low Priority”), and I just love going through my High Priority reads and trying to guess which ones I’ll find under the tree. Man…I love Christmas.
And I know not everyone celebrates Christmas, but you know what?
I love celebrating other people’s holidays too! So please, wish me a Happy Diwali!, Chag Sameach!, Eid Mubarak!, Gong Hei Fat Choy! - let’s celebrate!
We’ll celebrate together, read some awesome books, and there’ll be peace on Earth :)
So…I’ve got 10 main book recommendations tonight, and a few more as you keep scrolling down, but here are a few more quick suggestions, separated into Fiction and Nonfiction that could make great gifts as well:
Fiction Recommendations: | Nonfiction Recommendations: |
I’ve also got a new YouTube video that I just published earlier tonight:
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
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I’m an advisor to the company, helping to constantly improve and update the app, which also means that I’m able to offer you 56% OFF their annual subscription. Check out BookGenius.
When you do sign up, join my book club on the app! It’s called “The Reading Life.”
“Never admit defeat or poverty. Stoutly assert your divine right to hold your head up and look the world in the face; step bravely to the front whatever opposes, and the world will make way for you. No one will insist upon your rights while you yourself doubt that you have any. Believe you were made for the place you fill. Put forth your whole energies. Be awake, electrify yourself; go forth to the task."
“Once you identify who you need to beat, you will naturally raise the standard for what you must achieve.”
Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.
This month’s book is Choose Your Enemies Wisely, by Patrick Bet-David, a great business book about getting strategically emotional, selecting an enemy that you can use to focus all your energies on success, and going all-out.
Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!
After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,435 books, including 83 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“There’s almost no end to this. The millionaires look at the centimillionaires, who look at the billionaires, who look at the decabillionaires, who look at the centibillionaires. And what do the centibillionaires want? Immortality.”
The Art of Spending Money is yet another great book by Morgan Housel, this time about what money can buy, what it can’t buy, and how to tell the difference. I ended up with twelve pages of notes from the thing, and it’s easily one of the best books I read in 2025.
I’ll still be thinking about what I learned from it in 2035. Likely longer.
A few terms stand out that helped me think completely differently about money and its relationship to my life and happiness. One is “social debt,” which refers to how there are often hidden costs associated with certain large purchases and expenditures.
Once you’re expected to spend money, you have to keep spending money, or else risk losing the status you’ve gained within your newly-entered socioeconomic reference group.
Then there are ideas like “mental liquidity,” meaning the ease with which you’re able to change your mind based on new information. Housel also talks about how memories of past experiences can appreciate and grow in value as you get older - similar to Bill Perkins’ concept of “memory dividends” in his book, Die with Zero.
One of the main lessons of the book is that people are so often clueless about what will actually make them happy. The wrong question to ask in that situation is, “Can money buy happiness?”
Rather, you might ask, “How can money buy happiness?” “What haven’t I tried spending money on yet that might actually improve my life? What’s my thing? And how can I reduce the unnecessary spending in the other areas of my life so that I can spend even more money on what will truly make me happy?”
As you can imagine, this is a book that can keep you busy for long after you’ve read it. Housel covers a lot of ground (in this, and in his other two books, which are also excellent), and virtually everybody can make astounding financial progress (and “peace of mind” progress) by thinking deeply about what he has to say.
Another main idea you could take away from the book is that if you don’t think money can buy happiness, you just haven’t yet found your “thing.” It could be something physical, like a car. You’ll get no judgement from Morgan and I.
Or maybe you’ll discover that giving money away makes you stupidly happy and that you’d love to devote your life to that pursuit instead. Or maybe you’re happiest when you’re saving 50% of your paycheck, buying time, freedom, and independence that you can cash in later whenever you want.
It’s your life. It’s your money. Take inspiration from others, sure, but don’t allow them to dictate your spending decisions or desires. Learn who you are. Try a million things (wide funnel, strong filter), discard what doesn’t work for you, and through trial and error discover what does.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It Makes an Excellent Gift: Money topics can be a conversational minefield, depending on who you’re to talking to, but if you’ve got a friend or family member who’s fascinated by money, or even if they just want to get a little better at managing and spending it, get them this book!
“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.
Here’s one way of putting things in perspective: the first modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another 1.5 billion years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun condemns the last organism to death. But you?
Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.”
Adam Grant said that this is the most important book ever written about time management, and I’m certainly inclined to agree.
Burkeman’s approach has always been the “negative” one, by which I mean operating by negation – eliminating rather than adding.
For example, his “negative” approach to happiness outlined in his earlier book, The Antidote, meant embracing suffering, and doing things that are challenging, instead of running from them - which would have, paradoxically, led to more suffering over time.
That book basically dealt with the famous question: “Do you want an easy life? Or the strength to endure a difficult one?”
If you’re wise, you’ll take the strength every time! And here in Four Thousand Weeks, where time management is concerned, he counsels giving up the idea of ever getting everything done.
He says that you’re never going to get to a point where you feel like you’re totally on top of everything; and the very effort is wearing us out, stressing us out, and leading us to waste our absurdly, terrifyingly short lives on trivia and nonsense.
The amazing news he’s delivering is that you’re never going to get everything done!
Productivity is a trap, because the faster you complete the work assigned to you, the faster more work is going to be assigned to you.
There’s always something else that could be done, but if, instead, we embrace our mortality and our limited timescales, we can make the absolute most of the time we do have, and emerge with a life that’s both truly meaningful, and truly our own.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It Makes an Excellent Gift: Virtually everyone’s short on time these days, and so if you get them this book, they might just be able to give up the idea of trying to stuff an infinite number of tasks into a finite number of minutes each day. They’ll probably find some time to give you a sincere “thank you!" as well!
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day, and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous.
It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.”
I would unequivocally state that Atomic Habits is the definitive book on habits. It’s a 20-million-copy bestseller(!) that has lived up to all the hype, and I ended up with about eight pages of notes - I mean, this thing is packed with everything you need to know in order to set yourself up for every kind of success in the future.
One of the most powerful ideas for me was the idea that we should be far more concerned about our current trajectory than with our current results. The fact is that it takes time to get where we want to be in life, and the only thing we have absolute control over is the direction in which we’re heading.
Many years ago, Socrates would be asked many times, “How does one get to Mount Olympus?” Olympus, if you recall, is where all the gods hung out. So really, the questioner was asking how do we get to the top, to paradise, to our goals?
In response to this question, Socrates would always say, “Make sure that every step you take is in that direction.” Good habits are steps, and when you have all your habits aligned with your destination, you almost can’t help but arrive there eventually.
Everyone who has ever succeeded at anything, ever, has started out extremely far away from where they wanted to end up. Over time, their good habits pulled them closer and closer to their own version of Mount Olympus.
So the trajectory idea is big. One of the other big ideas was that every single action you take is like a vote for the person you want to become.
If you want to get fit, then every time you go to the gym or eat a healthy meal is a vote for who you will be in the future. Every time you pick up a book, you’re voting to become a reader, etc. Take those two ideas alone and you can change your life. But there’s so much more to this book, too.
According to him, the central question that James Clear is trying to answer through his work is, “How can we live better?” He’s spent years and years focusing on this question; reading, listening, learning, observing, speaking with people who are killing it in life, and he’s taken every single thing he’s learned and jammed it into this book.
As Clear says, we don’t rise to the level of our goals, or what we say we’re going to do; we fall to the level of our habits. ‘Atomic’ habits are the smallest-sized things that you can do immediately - today, now - that will let you steamroll past everything that’s been holding you back until now. So let’s get moving!
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It Makes an Excellent Gift: Because New Year’s Resolutions are right around the corner! Those rarely work, but the ideas in this book do.
“You aren’t stuck with the body you have. You can make it better, even if you’ve mishandled it, and it’s far simpler than many people believe. Even better, once you start changing your body, you’ll realize that you also have the power to change your life.”
Personal trainers inspire even less trust these days than personal injury lawyers, and people on social media are rightly suspicious of fitness “experts” slinging supplements with less muscle-building power than soy sauce. Which is why when people like Michael Matthews come along, we appreciate them even more. He’s the real deal.
Stronger Than Yesterday is a super-practical daily reader, containing 169 insights for transforming your body, mind, and motivation, and Matthews stands out as someone who actually wants you to succeed and knows exactly how to help you do that.
He has that perfect combination of unconditional support and encouragement, balanced with the recognition that no one goes through life at 100% every single day, and perfection is the dream of people who never got started in the first place.
The book contains simple, evidence-based techniques and tactics for improving your physique, reducing your risk of disease and dysfunction, slowing aging, and more.
Matthews realizes that 100% compliance is probably never going to happen, but he doesn’t let you get away with anything, least of all getting away with doing less than your best.
What you’ll realize is that when you start taking control of what happens inside the gym, you’ll start gaining more control over what happens in your life outside the gym too. You don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to try.
You will likely never reach perfection, but on any given day, you can be stronger than yesterday.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It Makes an Excellent Gift: This isn’t like any other “diet” or “fitness” book you could ever buy someone. It’s backed with rock-solid science, of course, but it’s also encouraging, realistic, funny, and wise. This is the kind of fitness book that actually gets read, and actually changes lives.
“What does it mean to ‘transform’ your relationship with money? It doesn’t mean getting more money or less money; it means knowing how much is enough money for you to have a life you love, now and in the future. It means shifting from being a victim of money and the economy to making conscious choices. Anyone can do this.”
I wasn’t about to read another personal finance book. My money is generally under control, and my life is generally under control, but I still gained a ton of insight from this book. So I can only imagine that someone whose financial situation is considerably worse could benefit a ton from reading it too.
Having flown through it and taken great notes, I can highly recommend it. And it’s sold close to a million copies, so it definitely resonates with a diverse crowd of people.
One major concept that emerges from the book is the idea of monitoring your “life energy” rather than just money. A lot goes into earning money – basically every minute and every dollar that you spend before, at, or after work that somehow involves your work – and all that time and effort is your life.
So you should at least make an effort to track where all that life energy is going!
The best way to manage your time is to figure out how you’re spending it now, and basically the same applies to money.
Budgets may be boring, but they are lifesavers in the right hands. The system outlined in the book is very practical, very efficient, and very helpful – I almost can’t imagine someone succeeding with money who doesn’t do and understand something similar to what the authors suggest.
Underneath it all, however, is your relationship with money – how much time you spend thinking about it, your feelings toward it, what you’re willing to do to get it under control. At one point, the authors ask: If you were money, would you hang out with you? Fair question.
So while this is not a “serious” personal finance book, it’s incredibly sincere. The practical and the pragmatic is mixed with the earnest and the heartfelt, and combined, the strategies, mindsets, and insights to be gained within this book make up time very well spent.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It Makes an Excellent Gift: This is another light and encouraging book, but it could be life-changing for the right recipient. Again, New Years is the time of year when most people are looking to make changes, so why not help them out with a book that’s likely to make a major difference!
“The ambition he had conceived as a schoolboy at Brienne, and from which he had never wavered, had been achieved. He had transformed the art of leadership, built an empire, handed down laws for the ages, and joined the ancients.”
There have been more books written with the word Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821, but in a very real, visceral sense, this book brought him back to life, at least in my imagination.
Most everything I thought I knew about Napoleon – which, admittedly, wasn’t all that much – turned out to be either wrong or incomplete, and in this 800-page biography that I inhaled in a week I found myself swept up in the larger-than-life majesty of Napoleon’s life and campaigns.
It’s actually astonishing how many of the institutions and laws and reforms that exist today come directly from him. Meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education and so much more were ushered in during Napoleon’s reign, and he championed all of it.
It took almost every nation in Europe banding together in order to defeat him, and they had to adopt many of his reforms themselves in order to do it.
The main parts of the book are sometimes really, really funny as well, such as the time when Napoleon called his foreign minister, Talleyrand, a “shit in silk stockings.”
Talleyrand was also once asked if Napoleon’s wife Josephine possessed intelligence, and he was heard to say, “Never has anyone managed so brilliantly without it.” Hilarious! And the whole book is like that.
Just the massive scale and scope of Napoleon’s adventures, his sweeping vision, and his humanity…they all combine to make this one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, biographies or no.
Napoleon’s single-minded focus, the fierce love and dedication he was able to inspire in his soldiers, his grand ambition and stunning boldness are all painted in vivid detail, and by contrast, his last days hit me as being so tragic.
I actually had a hard time reading the last 50 pages because I hated to see him brought down to earth. It’s still hard to imagine that someone like that ever truly perished from the earth, but I’m grateful to have been able to read his story.
Difficulty Rating: Moderate
Why It Makes an Excellent Gift: This has to be one of my absolute favorite history books of all time, and I firmly believe that almost any history lover would be thrilled to see this under the tree as well. And if they’re unsure? Just recommend that they read the first thirty pages. They’ll be hooked.
“Millions of his viewers grew up to be adults who hold on to those values and maintain a loyalty to Fred and his work. He exemplified a life lived by the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ found in some form in almost every religion and philosophy throughout history. His lesson is as simple and direct as Fred was: Human kindness will always make life better.”
Children can always spot a fraud; they know when someone’s not being authentic or when they’re different from who they claim to be – which is evidence that Mister Rogers was the real deal.
He was one of the most inspiring early childhood educators ever, and he saw the best in kids, which made it possible for them to bring out the best in themselves.
I absolutely loved every page of this biography of Mister Rogers and it’s now one of my favorite books that I’ve ever read (out of more than 1,000 books), but it also made me a better educator myself.
That’s what I am – an educator – and while my audience is a little bit older, I want to be one of the “good guys” just like Mister Rogers was, and I want my little corner of the internet to be as wonderful as his Neighborhood.
There are astonishing stories on nearly every page of this book, such as when the TV station held an event where children could come and meet Mister Rogers – thousands of kids showed up, lining up for miles and blocking the street like it was a college football game or something.
But no matter how long the line was, he would get down on one knee, look each kid in the eye and make sure they knew that they mattered. He took kids and their questions seriously, he made a massive effort to give them the best possible start in life, and I just…I just want to be like him!
It’s funny: you keep reading page after page of this book and you’re like, “There has to be like some sort of scandal, a dark corner of his life, some secrets…” but no; Mister Rogers was exactly who he said he was, and though there may not be angels, there are people who may as well be angels – that was him.
When you offer that kind of unconditional love and support to children, every single morning on his television show for more than 30 years, the kids are going to grow up just fine.
When you read the comments on some of the recent Mister Rogers YouTube tribute videos it’s all there. You have thousands and thousands of positive comments – never negative ones – with people saying things like, “My childhood was a fucking nightmare; Mister Rogers was the only adult who ever told me I was worth anything,” and stuff like that. It’s honestly amazing, and more than a little bit sad.
As you can probably tell, I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend this book to pretty much everyone, and I’ve been thinking about it almost every single day since I read it.
His story is surprising, sad, exciting, inspiring – everything you wouldn’t expect from that nice man in the cardigan that used to show up every morning and tell you that he loved you just the way you are.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It Makes an Excellent Gift: Christmas is all above love and family and setting a fantastic example of togetherness and warmth to follow for the rest of the year. This book captures that spirit perfectly, and I can’t imagine anyone reading it and not being profoundly affected by it.
“Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”
Usually, I finish a book every two days, but I strung this one out for weeks and weeks because I was loving it so much. It is, in no uncertain terms, a masterpiece, and now it’s one of my absolute favorite books. A look through my notes on the book might give some indication why, but it’s partly because of the unique structure of the narrative itself.
The book is arranged in six interlocking parts, told from six different perspectives, first going forward in time as usual, until the middle section, at which point it folds back on itself and goes back through the time periods in reverse order, completing each narrative.
Starting from a character traveling aboard a slave ship in the 19th century, we move forward to the early twentieth, the late twentieth, the near future, a little further into the future, then the late future and back again, with the actions and lives of each character affecting and influencing each other across time and space.
The storylines are funny, nail-biting, vicious, exhilarating, suspenseful, deep – and sometimes several of those at once.
The literary references will keep lifelong readers searchingly engaged, the cliff-hangers will keep most readers up way later than they should be, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll read this book more slowly as you approach the final page, just so you can keep the book going and it doesn’t ever have to end.
Difficulty Rating: Moderate
Why It Makes an Excellent Gift: Speaking from personal experience on this one. I got Cloud Atlas for Christmas one year and didn’t want to read ANYTHING else until I was finished.
“The moon and the stars were nowhere to be seen, as though they had been scattered by the brilliance of the flames, and only the corpses of burned books lit the sky.”
Another random bookstore find, this is a sparse, dystopian novel that will stay with me for quite a while. The “book hangover” from this one lasted a long time!
Actually, the more you think about the book, and consider the structure – the hidden meanings, the references – the more you come to appreciate the craft and the care that went into writing it.
Not surprisingly, it was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, it and the author have received a crazy number of other literary awards, and it has been favorably compared to 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and others.
The basic plot is that, on an unnamed island, the unnamed narrator tells of the “disappearances” from the island of things like photographs, novels, even birds, and she explains how it’s the job of the Memory Police to find people who still remember - and eliminate them.
Or at least “disappear” them as well since it’s never really clear what happens to them once the Memory Police take them away.
That’s what’s so eerie and cool about this book: hardly any of the main characters are named (there’s “R”, her editor, “the old man,” her closest friend, etc.) – nothing is fixed in time or place, and that gives this novel a disorienting, uncomfortable feel that meshes perfectly with its exploration of memory, loss, and significance.
The ending, too is just…phenomenal. I’m so glad I picked up this book in a bookstore I forget the name of, on an island I rarely go to, during a time in my life I’ll never forget.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It Makes an Excellent Gift: Truthfully, this one might be hit or miss. I’ve recommended this book to various people, with varying degrees of success. But if the person you’re thinking of giving it to like books about books (and especially Fahrenheit 451), they might really love this one.
“Normal is not something you aspire to. It’s something you get away from.”
I always tell people to ignore the slightly scammy title of this book and just read the thing, because it’s absolutely incredible, and downright life-changing for the right person at the right time. That “right person” was actually me, as I can still remember exactly where I was when I first read it. It marked a turning point in my life, and I say that with no exaggeration whatsoever.
Briefly, I read the book sitting in my car, while working a minimum-wage, overnight security job that held absolutely no future whatsoever. I finished reading - implementing and taking action on everything M.J. told me to do (this took years, but it was worth it) - eventually leading to me becoming a full-time content creator reviewing and recommending the books I love, and even having M.J. appear as a guest on my podcast at one point!
“Fastlane” does not mean “get rich easy,” by the way.
Get rich quick exists, but get rich easy does not, and even most people’s definition of “quick” would be much different than DeMarco’s. He’s talking 5-10 years of building a business, likely using the internet, which is quick, compared to patiently investing your money in the stock market for 40 years, hoping and praying that the economy doesn’t implode, just so you can finally start enjoying yourself when you’re a senior citizen.
Wheelchairs don’t fit inside the trunks of Lamborghinis, after all!
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in the stock market either, by the way! DeMarco does, I do, and it’s a fantastic long-term wealth-building strategy. But it’s not typically how you become free at an early age, which is what a profitable, fastlane business will do for you. It all comes back down to freedom and fulfillment.
The Millionaire Fastlane changed the way I think about business, about making money…about life! It changed everything for me, and I wholeheartedly recommend it all the time, basically to anyone who will listen. Even just learning the “C-E-N-T-S” framework and the difference between “scale” and “magnitude” can make you rich.
At the end of the day, owning a business is one of the greatest keys to freedom available to anyone with an internet connection and a burning desire to succeed.
The Millionaire Fastlane also taught me that you can just do stuff; you don’t need anyone else’s permission to be successful, and you certainly don’t need to spend your entire life getting bossed around by other humans at some job you despise.
Days of the week aren’t even real! They’re just abstractions we use to make sense of an inherently chaotic universe. You don’t need to live in fear of Monday, and you certainly don’t need to live the kind of life that the rest of society expects.
Difficulty Rating: Easy
Why It Makes an Excellent Gift: Alright so this one’s perfect for someone, possibly younger (but they don’t have to be), who's either interested in starting a business or already started one. And if they’re already starting to suspect that pretty much the entire modern world is a giant scam from cradle-to-grave? They might be ready for this one.
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OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.
And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 180,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and scaling my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are two more ways I can help you:
Educational Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business.
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