Winter's here, and with the piles of snow and encroaching cold, you don't really want to venture outside, do you? Now's the perfect time to cozy up with a stack of books, or add some to your Christmas list. From stuffed sharks to cartoons, history and more, here's a list of new and notable reads for the coming winter months.

• 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 912 pp.) — The reading of a 900-plus-page novel sounds more like a challenge than entertainment, but Bolano’s last work (first published posthumously in 2004) is a modern magical-realist classic, a beguiling, horrifying romp though Mexican history. The main narrative concerns a group of disparate travellers working their way to the city of Santa Teresa, each attempting to solve their own individual mysteries, as the larger one — the disappearance of countless women from the area in the last decade — looms over them all. (The story is based on the real murders and disappearances of hundreds of women from Ciudad Juarez.) Along the way, Bolano digresses into dialogues on Greek gods and historical trivia, with details both beautiful and gruesome. A great book to tackle over the holiday.

• Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount Jr. (Douglas & McIntyre, 384 pp.) — English and grammar fans have no shortage of books to nerd out on, and readers of Blount Jr.’s look into the history behind common words and phrases won’t find anything new. This cumbersome collection is arranged like a dictionary, with some entries reading like effortlessly condensed tidbits, while others are quickly tossed off. All are marred by the author’s groaningly unfunny geriatric humour. Avoid.

• The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel (Vertigo, 136 pp.) — Novelist Ames looks inward with this disarmingly honest and upsetting tale. “Jonathan A.” wakes up in a ratty station wagon with an elderly she-dwarf who is trying to blow him. The incident naturally leads him down a path of self-reflection, from his early teen binges through sexual fumblings, creating a literary career and drinking himself into oblivion. Ames’s language is plain and direct, suited to Haspiel’s angular and expressive art.

• Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle (Drawn and Quarterly, 208 pp.) - The latest travelogue from cartoonist Delisle (Pyongyang, Shenzhen). The book displays the same curious bafflement that often accompanies such travel memoirs, but is packed with detail — the scorching heat, burgeoning industry, military oppression and media censorship, accompanied by Delisle’s charming, delicate black-and-white cartooning.

• Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago (Harcourt, 256 pp.) — Saramago continues to spin further into his brand of procedural prose with his latest, a cross between Blindness and Death Takes a Holiday, where death, tired of the reaping game, decides to take a break, with chaotic results. It’s much better than Blindness’s achingly dull sequel-of-sorts, Seeing, although the prose of his earlier works — overflowing with ideas, yet skillfully cadenced — now often reads like a laundry list of bureaucratic mumblings and metaphysical prattling.

• The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson (Doubleday Canada, 272 pp.) — The title refers, of course, to celebrity (er, I mean “artist”) Damien Hirst, who gained an enormous payday for selling a taxidermied fish. Thompson spends most of his tale focusing on notorious art collector Charles Saatchi, the wealthy banker who bought the shark, and his slimy tendrils that wind through the contemporary art scene. By “scene,” I should clarify that I mean “commercial scene.” It’s a wild, baffling world where auctions and toadying create a cult of celebrity under the auspices of “contemporary art,” and critical dialogues are replaced by champagne and handfuls of cash. That said, if there’s one fault with the book, it’s that Thompson only briefly discusses the tenuous role that critics play. A welcome and controversial book.

• The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell (Riverhead, 272 pp.) — Beloved journalist and professional nerd Vowell (Assassination Vacation, The Partly Cloudy Patriot) once again tackles American history, this time uncovering the strange and often bloody history of the Puritans, and how their blend of religious zealotry and political ideals shaped America’s self-rightousness and morality. Fans of Vowell’s wry humour and love of factoids will love it.

• Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy by Savannah Knoop (Seven Stories, 224 pp.) — Remember JT LeRoy? The brief literary sensation (Sarah, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things) was the critical darling of a few artists who championed the transgendered truckstop prostitute’s tales of backwoods woe and abuse. Only, it turned out that LeRoy was actually a woman — Laura Albert — and, in public, was played by Albert’s sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop. Rather than discuss the issues around authorial voice and whether identity is more important than the work in question, Knoop chooses to write about partying with celebrities. Considering that LeRoy was exposed three years ago, this memoir is too little, too late and too boring.