Bestsellers & Returns: December 2025
An end-of-the-month series to celebrate the weird and wonderful parts of being a bookseller
Here we are, the end of another year. I’ve been thinking about 2025 this past week and trying to rate it somehow. Was it a good year or just so-so, and how do I even go about measuring this? I’m writing tonight’s entry from a hotel room in central Ohio, and though I’m grateful to have the means and the time to be with my family for the last week of 2025, the restless part of me (that seems to have been so loud this year) is thinking things like: Seven years ago we were living in Beijing! Shouldn’t we be somewhere other than home again?!
I can’t give that part a clear answer, but I’m at least trying to listen and acknowledge what she has to say.
One thing I know for certain about this past year: Working nearly every day of it at Prairie Lights has made my life rich with community, joy, and inspiration. I still can’t believe I get to work at this world-renowned bookstore for a living, and it’s in this spirit of gratitude that I want to write my final Bestsellers & Returns of 2025.
Before I get into the details, here’s my usual spiel:
At the end of each month, I highlight the magical, wonderful things I get to witness as a bookseller, usually while sitting at a back desk somewhere in the store—the “Bestsellers,” if you will—as well as things that might be weird, off-putting, or beyond explanation. These I call “Returns” in the spirit of gentle humor…returning books for publisher credit is an important part of the bookselling business, after all. Not every book sells, and the ones that sit too long on our shelves might as well be shipped off to another store to try their luck elsewhere. Writing about “Returns” are my way of saying “I release you” to the stuff in my job that irks me, and I’m hoping this release will both help me stay sane and generate a few laughs along the way. As always, my opinions & observations are in no way representative of Prairie Lights as a company or the staff as a whole. I’m simply one bookseller observing from my little corners and making notes on what I see. I also pledge to avoid giving any personal details about any customer or writer who crosses our threshold (unless a writer is part of one of our excellent readings!)—Iowa City is a small community, after all.
For my final installment of 2025, I think both the bestsellers and returns came from the same activity I did most often at the bookstore in December: sales. Being at the register during this particular holiday season brought up some complex feelings for me.
As you might imagine, this work was exhausting, and not every customer sported the typical holiday cheer. I was amazed by how many folks avoided simple eye contact with me during a thirty-second transaction, and by how many seemed really stressed even as soothing symphonic music played through our speakers. I found myself at times really hating the capitalist yoke we all tether ourselves to, even though my customers were handing their credit cards over for books. This month just felt so manic, you know? I still feel the collective stress trapped in my body, and I’m summoning all the post-Christmas energy I have tonight just to get this entry out into the world.
The last shift I worked before my break was Christmas Eve, and I was there for the whole time we were open, ten in the morning to four in the afternoon. People were buying books and other trinkets like we were going out of business, and I struggled to wrap my head around the sense of desperation I was feeling from folks who practically threw their selected books at me on the counter. Where does this angst come from? I tried to amuse myself as I waved the scanner endlessly over barcodes by wondering the stories behind each purchase. Was that massive art book for a father-in-law who needed a little culture injected into his life, or that Emily Henry box-set of paperbacks for a daughter being gently coaxed into reading? I thought about how every book one person gives another is an invitation to connect with words they either fell in love with themselves or heard someone else fell in love with, and that gave me a warm feeling amidst all the madness.
This is why, even as the nonstop sales gave me several headaches and sore feet, they also filled me with a deep well of glimmering hope. In the week leading up to Christmas, we made tens of thousands of dollars in books sold every day. Think about that for a moment, the sheer number of books that is. It’s a lot.
On my tax form in January, I may look like just another person earning a modest salary at the same rate of pretty much every other retail shop in town, but I feel my work at Prairie Lights is connecting me to other writers and creatives in a way I’d never have otherwise. Just this past Saturday, while I was working my last seasonal shift at the nearby Prairie Kitchen Store, Chris Offutt walked up to my register and said, “I know you, don’t I?” He did indeed; I reminded him that I was Jenny from Prairie Lights, and his face lit up with recognition because he’d talked with me for half an hour after his most recent PL reading about how hard the industry was and how I simply just never had to give up. An Emmy-nominated, Pushcart Prize-winning, and Guggenheim + Whiting + NEA grant-receiving writer knows who I am. Wild.
As nice as the connections to big-time writers are, I realize now, a year and a half into this job, its best gift is the access it’s given me to some of the very best people in my community—all of whom work with me. Kathleen isn’t just a spectacular events coordinator of the highest professionalism—she also makes me laugh during every shift with her delightfully dark sense of humor. Karl isn’t just a kind and intuitive shift manager—he also happens to be a talented baker who shares his treats with all of us. Wendy hugs me at the start of each of our shared Sunday shifts, and we take turns buying each other tea. Reen, our current café manager and barista extraordinaire, always has a story to share when I see them upstairs, and they sometimes bring treats to share, too. (The chocolate-covered candied orange peel pictured below was from them, and it was soooo good.) Jan asks for my honest opinions of books we’ve both read, Tim dazzles me with his many anecdotes and spirited retellings of stories old and new, and Terry always asks me how my cat’s doing since he has his own. Best of all, I get book recommendations from everyone, and many are books I probably wouldn’t have discovered on my own. These colleagues are extraordinary, and I look forward to seeing them before every shift.
Rebecca Solnit writes in her memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence (which was a recent book recommendation from a colleague and OH MY GOD IT’S AMAZING, I can’t believe it took me this long to find her) about the friends she made in her twenties and thirties in San Francisco and during her journeys out into America’s deeply misunderstood West, and she explains how these friends both modeled how to be a whole person (i.e., how to work around very real threats and fears as a young woman) and encouraged her to do the same. My PL colleagues are my role models and fellow encouragers, and I hope to be at least half as outstanding as they are someday. I feel like I still have a long way to go.
Image description: During an especially busy Christmas Eve shift at the PL register, I managed to sneak little bites of chocolate-covered orange from one colleague and a loaned copy of Recollections of My Nonexistence from another. I felt fed by both amidst the collective chaos of last-minute shoppers.
I want to end this final Substack post of 2025 with a simple thank you to my readers, my colleagues, and my friends. You keep refilling my little hope-well, which motivates me to keep writing. I hope we all get a chance at some much-needed rest in the next couple of weeks and come back to whatever work we’re called to do—both what’s paid and what isn’t—refreshed and refilled.