We try not to play favorites, but Iceland has some truly superb folklore. Not only do they have the Yule Cat (or Jólakötturinn, the gigantic Christmas cat who will GOBBLE YOU UP if you don’t get new clothes for the holiday), but they have Jolabokaflod, which we would like the rest of the world to commit to immediately. 

Jolabokaflod roughly translates as the “Christmas Book Flood,” and it’s just as epic as it sounds.

Here’s the deal:

In Iceland, Christmas gifts are traditionally given on Christmas Eve. And books are the gift of choice! Iceland has an unusually nationally strong literary tradition – it publishes more books per capita than any other country in the world, with strong book sales among a wide swath of their population. But books as Christmas gifts really solidified during World War II, when imports were sharply restricted. Imported paper, however, was easier to come by than many other products. And so books became the Icelandic Christmas gift of choice, a trend that has continued in the decades ever since.

In practice, this means that in Iceland, people give each other the gift of books on Christmas Eve, then snuggle up to read them the rest of the night, often while drinking hot chocolate.

Can we just say: YES PLEASE.

If you too would like to emulate this perfect bit of folklore, for this last newsletter of the year, we’d like to spotlight a few books that you might like to use as fuel for your own personal Book Flood.

Fairylore by Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman – You may have noticed that we’ve been screaming about our forthcoming book, which is available for preorder now. While the physical book itself won’t be ready by Christmas, if you preorder, we’ll immediately send you a collection of all the glorious short stories that we had to cut from Fairylore for space reasons. And you can read that armed with your hot chocolate by the fire on Christmas Eve!

Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance by Jane Harrington – We haven’t read this one yet, but it looks STUNNING and is about a subject near and dear to our hearts: the seventeenth-century French conteuses, or female storytellers, who wrote weird, wonderful, rebellious fairy tales that very much challenged the social and political status quo. Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance offers biographies of 7 of the writers and retells 12 of their original stories.

This Journal F*cking Works: The Science, Ritual, and Art of Journaling by Tara Schuster – If you want to commit to a journaling practice in 2026, this is the book you want. Tara is a dear friend of Sara’s, and Sara will personally attest that she herself has historically hated journaling and that Tara is the one who got her to do it and not hate it. Tara put a ridiculous amount of research and love into this journal, and it shows. It’s also completely gorgeous, irreverent, and useful, which is basically Tara’s whole thing. You know you want to journal by the fire with this. 

A Widow’s Charm by Caitlyn Paxson – This is another book that’s currently for preorder (so not Christmas ready) BUT it looks absolutely wonderful, and we simply had to mention it. The shortest summary on the sales page reads: “In this witty fantasy romance, a widow attempts to resurrect her dead husband by blackmailing her rakish necromancer neighbor—only to find herself falling for him instead.” The Carterhaugh brand is strong with this one. 

Higher Magic by Courtney Floyd [Sara’s favorite new book of the year] – We’re reading this one in our book club in January (COME JOIN US!) so we don’t want to say too much about it except that it is somehow the most accurate description of grad school we’ve ever read in fiction despite the protagonist studying magic, and as a result it is SO funny, so horrifying, and so fierce, and we love it so much. (The author, Courtney Floyd, has a PhD in Victorian lit and works in instructional design, and it shows!) 

Darkly & Night Film by Marisha Pessl [Brittany’s favorite new books of the year] – Brittany loved these two books so much she’s reluctant to even let other people read them because she doesn’t know if she could take people not liking them! She read them back to back, despite Night Film being over 600 pages long (which, if you know Brittany’s reading habits, is RARE), and just devoured them utterly. If you enjoy eccentric but genius creatives, mysteries, stories about the power of art (especially immersive art like Sleep No More), the use of ephemera, unconventional storytelling, etc. you will love both of these. (A brief warning though – Darkly is squarely YA, but Night Film is definitely not and does contain some disturbing material – please take care of yourself!)  

In short – help us make Book Flood a thing in the US, or wherever you are in the world, by gifting books and supporting authors! And if you preorder our book, don’t forget you get all kinds of goodies.

Happy Holidays, and we hope the rest of your 2025 is full of laughter, books, folklore, sparkly darkness, and light. We’ll be back in January! 

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