Holiday Hours at Bel Canto Books

Holy smokes, it’s one week to Christmas Eve, and I have barely made a dent in my holiday gift list this year. This is one of the very real consequences of being a small business owner - we’re often too busy getting our shops ready for the holidays and helping others with gift ideas to have the mental capacity to focus on ourselves. It’s gift cards to the rescue for me, LOL. (If you’re in the same boat, check out this IG post about where to get bookish gift cards that support our store.)

If you still need physical gifts, we’ll be open every day through Christmas Eve at BCB Retro Row and at KUBO LB. If you’re on 4th Street or Bixby Knolls in Long Beach, please stop by to say hello, commiserate about how fast the holidays pass the older we get, and just bask in the glory of a fully stocked bookstore - I promise that perusing the shelves will bring a smile to your face.

Here’s to books, laughter, and joyful resistance!

Jhoanna
Head Booknerd + Owner of Bel Canto Books

Congrats to our 2025 Bestsellers!

It’s no surprise that UMMA, the incredible Korean cookbook by SoCal locals Sarah Ahn and Nam Soon Ahn, topped our bestseller list this year, with over 1,000 copies sold over their amazing multi-year preorder campaign. If you had told me that we’d been mailing pallets of a 3lb cookbook this year, I would have called you crazy. But the love and care that Sarah and Nam Soon put into the book and their writing and recipe testing process is evident in every page.

I love that Long Beach local and #friendofthebookstore Elise Bryant appears on two of our bestseller lists, along with MARTEE DARES TO DANCE by Shelby Rabara and Harry Shum, Jr. It amazes me how diverse our bestseller lists are, with each store and event location highlighting an almost completely different set of books, confirming how varied our readers’ tastes are.

Check out each BCB location’s top 25 bestselling books at Bookshop.org and see what I mean about the beauty of diversity and vibrant storytelling! This is a great place to start if you’re planning your 2026 reading list.

Top 25 Bestsellers at Bel Canto Books Retro Row
Top 25 Bestsellers at KUBO LB
Top 10 Event Bestsellers at Bel Canto Books

Membership Drive Update

A quick Bel Canto Books Membership Drive update: we have just two weeks left of our 2025 membership drive. We’ve gained 27 new members and raised more than $6K to support our work of uplifting BIPOC and queer authors and sustaining a thriving community of readers and artists!

We’d love to get to 50 new members by the end of the month, so please consider joining or gifting a membership today! Every new member will receive a cool new “BCB Proud Supporter” member sticker (seen in the photo above), along with our 2025 Year in Review zine (template courtesy of graphic journalist, editor, and zinester extraordinaire Shay Mirk).

Become a Bel Canto Books member or gift a membership today!

Jho’s Favorite Books of the Year

Our last category in Jho’s Favorite Books of the Year is fiction, which is the hardest for me to narrow down since I love novels and I’ve been doing lots of escapist reading this year to cope with all the batshit craziness. Since I’m the “big cheese” (lol, aka the weirdo who keeps writing these newsletters), I’ve decided to break this into two subcategories - speculative fiction and realist fiction (aka literary realism - I literally just confirmed this is a thing on Wikipedia, lol) - so I can recommend six novels instead of just three. Hooray for more book recommendations!

Speculative fiction:

• A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT by Becky Chambers - our gateway drug into the magical worlds of Becky Chambers, filled with wonder, curiosity, and a blueprint for a better world where humans learn to live (and thrive) in respectful community with nature and technology

• LIGHTBREAKERS by Aja Gabel - a fantastic sophomore novel about time travel, grief and love, and the pleasures and challenges of art-making, set in the American West and Tokyo

• SALTCROP by Yume Kitasai - two young women set out to find their missing older sister in this dystopian cli-fi novel, battling the consequences of rising oceans, a contaminated food chain, and Big Ag’s monopoly on engineered seed

Realist fiction:

• THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS by Ocean Vuong - one of our #autobuy authors who does not disappoint in this new novel, which opens with a thwarted suicide and brims with love, longing, and the joy of chosen family.

• MODERATION by Elaine Castillo - Gah! Another one of our #autobuy authors who also understands the assignment of providing us with stories that burrow deep into our complicated hearts, this one set in the scintillating and corrupt world of Big Tech.

• THE WHITE HOT by Quiara Alegría Hudes - I love smart, unlikeable characters who make you question what you think you know, and April, the protagonist of THE WHITE HOT, is the ultimate “bad seed,” a beleaguered young mother who runs away from her life.