Getting away for the holidays? Staying home? Joining family or friends for a frenzy of festivities and merry-making?

However or wherever you are planning to spend the holidays, you're probably planning to take a book along with you. With that in mind we've put together a list of recommended holiday reads for your enjoyment. From non-fiction to fantastic, brand-new to old favourite, we think there's something for everyone on this list.

Enjoy, and happy holidays, from the staff at CTV.ca!

"My Friend Leonard" by James Frey

Reviewed by Sandie Benitah

James Frey certainly created a stir with his memoir "A Million Little Pieces." Unfortunately the controversy over his honesty -- or lack thereof -- unfairly overshadowed the release of his follow-up book, "My Friend Leonard."

In truth, "My Friend Leonard" is a raw but touching tale of tragedy, love, friendship and perseverance.

Best of all, the story is about Frey's relationship with himself as he struggles to get his life back on track after he is released from prison, where he served a brief sentence.

The story picks up where "A Million Little Pieces" leaves off.

Frey leaves jail with high hopes of reuniting with his girlfriend Lily, whom he met at rehab when they were both being treated for addictions to drugs and alcohol.

Frey is a new man -- sober, wiser and determined to create a stable future for himself and his love. But he is crushed when he learns Lily committed suicide the morning he was released from prison.

What follows is Frey's journey over the next few years as he struggles to keep his sobriety and self-loathing in check, and depends on his old friend Leonard for his unwavering support.

While there was some question surrounding how much of the story in "A Million Little Pieces" Frey actually experienced, there is no question the truth was skewed in "My Friend Leonard."

But it hardly matters.

Real or not, "My Friend Leonard" accomplishes everything a great novel should. The story is thought-provoking, engaging, haunting and complex.

The writing is brilliantly jarring as Frey writes in his trademark stream-of-consciousness style. His language and sentence structure is subtle and simple yet it evokes the intensity of the moment and each emotion that defines it.

As you turn the last page in the book, you will not be left wondering if the story actually happened as it was told. You'll be wondering about your own inner strength and questioning the human condition and spirit.

"My Friend Leonard" is a dark but inspirational page-turner that gives Frey back the credibility and kudos he lost while promoting his first book.

"Schultz and Peanuts: A Biography" by David Michaelis

Reviewed by Geoff Nixon

He's been gone almost 10 years, but his cartoon creations keep on popping up on T-shirts, newspaper pages and television, especially at this time of year, when the sad-sack Charlie Brown makes his annual appeal for Christmas spirit.

Charles Schultz, the creator of the entire Peanuts gang, was long portrayed as a shy and sensitive genius who didn't want to explain the meaning behind the 17,897 comic strips he created over a career that spanned nearly 50 years.

After Schultz's death in February 2000, writer David Michaelis spent years researching the life of the man behind the depressed protagonist who was forever incapable of kicking the football that life held out to him.

Michaelis probes how Schultz, from his humble roots as the shy, only-child of a barber in Minnesota, grew up to lead a machine gun troop in the Second World War and eventually become a professional cartoonist who earned riches beyond his wildest dreams.

The book also probes the parts of Schultz's personality that weren't as widely known to the public - including his highly competitive drive, his rivalry with other cartoonists and his interest in much-younger women.

Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, Michaelis' book is a must-read for people who want to understand Schultz, both the man and the comic strip artist.

"Superfreakonomics" by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Reviewed by Angela Mulholland

Steven Levitt and co-author Stephen Dubner's sequel to "Freakonomics" offers a whole lot more of what made their first work such a bestseller: a bunch of fascinating, oddball research into the many things that drive human behaviour.

Peppered with colourful anecdotes and an easy writing style that defies the reader to put the book down for even just one second, "Superfreakonomics" offers insights into things you never wanted to know, and makes you question everything you thought you did know.

In its first chapter -- by far its most quoted -- the authors posit, for example, that pimps are not evil traffickers of human flesh but instead are good business managers who protect their workers and help to "up-sell" customers on more expensive services.

They also suggest that the environment would be in much better shape if people stopped eating beef and started eating kangaroos, because they tend to fart a lot less. They offer evidence that driving drunk is safer than walking drunk (at least on a mile-by-mile basis). And they suggest that a really good volcanic eruption would do a lot more to cool the Earth than any amount of greenhouse gas cutting will ever do.

While Levitt and Dubner have faced plenty of criticism with this book  - particularly on the global warming chapters -- it's hard to argue that "Superfreakonomics" doesn't make for an engaging read that will have give you plenty of fodder for holiday party debates.

"The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon" by David Grann

Reviewed by Ian Munroe

This could easily be the year's best adventure book, and it's summed up best by the author's own impression of writing it.

Grann, a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine, occasionally had to remind himself "that everything in this story is true: a movie star really was abducted by Indians; there were cannibals, ruins, secret maps, and spies; explorers died from starvation, disease, attacks by wild animals and poisonous arrows; and at stake amid the adventure and death was the very understanding of the Americas before Christopher Columbus came ashore in the New World."

"The Lost City of Z" was born from Grann's all-consuming search to find a world-renowned Amazonian explorer named Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925 during a quest to find a mythical city he had dubbed "Z."

Many expeditions followed in Fawcett's footsteps in an attempt to discover what befell him, and many suffered tragedies of their own. To investigate for himself, Grann sets foot along the infamous path Fawcett is believed to have taken through Bolivia, across some of the world's most uninhabitable terrain.

Thankfully the author survived, producing a meticulously researched and well-crafted historical mystery that is, almost unbelievably, true.

"The Holder of the World" by Bharati Mukherjee

Reviewed by Sumran Bhan

American Puritans and Indian Mughals -- very rarely does history or literature bring these two worlds together. Very rarely do you read "So while the Taj Mahal was slowly rising in a cleared forest on the banks of the Yamuna, young Muster was clearing the forest on the banks of the Quabaug..."

These communities do however collide in "The Holder of the World," through Beigh Masters, an American asset hunter living in New England in the 1990s. The novel is a fascinating blend of history and fiction that produces a story that travels around the world and across several centuries.

Masters, the main character and the narrator, in search for her family history and the world's most perfect diamond, stumbles onto the life of Hannah Easton. Known also as the Salem Bibi and Precious-as-the-Pearl, all of Master's quests converge on this distant ancestor.

Throughout the book, the reader is left, as her narrator points out, "slaloming between us and them, imagining our wonder and their dread, now as a freebooter from colonial Rehoboth or Marblehead, and now as a Hindu king or Mughal emperor..."

The back-and-forth between times and places though, is more delicate than slaloming. Sometimes through the tint of a ruby, sometimes through drops of rain, present scenes melt away and you are transported to another land.

As Masters' and Hannah's stories unfold, author Bharati Mukerjee explores ideas of culture, religion, instinct, duty and desire. All while telling a tale that is rich and luminous - just like the diamond Beigh is in search of.

"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" by Seth Grahame-Smith

Reviewed by Mary Gazze

You know how your parents used to sneak vegetables onto your plate at dinner? Now you can sneak literature into your guilty-pleasure reads about monsters.

You deserve a holiday break from the family gatherings and bursting-at-the-seams malls, by reading something light and funny. Yes, zombies can be funny. At least they are in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," a book that has been touted as 85 per cent Jane Austen, with the rest filled in by author Seth Grahame-Smith.

Steering away from the vampire themed movies and lit du jour, Grahame-Smith delves into the world of the 19th century English countryside but gives readers an undead twist -- in between fancy balls, visits to neighbouring estates, and playing cards to pass the time, the famous Bennet girls must fight a plague of zombies (or as the book sometimes calls them, "unmentionables" or "sorry stricken") as it afflicts the country folk. 

And rather than being the traditional damsels in distress, they kick serious undead butt. They have extensive ninja training and are well versed in the "deadly arts" thanks to martial arts training in China. And the men in this book do not shun the women for not being "feminine" in the archaic Victorian sense, but instead shower them with admiration for their formidable skills in defending themselves and their neighbours. 

What makes this book great is the fact that the Grahame-Smith manages to intertwine the zombie scenes into the original text while preserving the Victorian tone of propriety and good manners. Words like rotting flesh, ninja swords, or muskets creep into the text seamlessly, in chats about the horse and carriage. And you'll find yourself chuckling when you picture Victorian ladies and then read lines like "Elizabeth took to the small grinding wheel in the corner of the room and watched it all with great delight whilst sharpening the gentlemen's swords -- which she had found embarrassingly dull upon examination." The lines get especially funny if you imagine Jane Austen herself as the narrator.

You'll find you'll gladly pay much more attention to the book this time around than you did in Grade 10 English class. 

"Lush Life" by Richard Price

Reviewed by Andrea Janus

Walk around the CTV newsroom and you're likely to hear as much talk about The Wire -- the Baltimore-based HBO crime drama that went off the air in 2008 after five seasons -- as the latest breaking news from Ottawa and around the world.

The gritty show took turns telling street stories from the perspective of the criminals and the cops, and the politicians that blur the line between the two.

The show was beloved by journalists for its gripping stories and snappy dialogue, some of which was written by screenwriter and novelist Richard Price.

Fans of the show, and Price's earlier books, won't be able to put down his most-recent novel, in which he paints a pitch-perfect portrait of what can happen when cops, crooks and upwardly mobile twenty- and thirty-somethings bump up against each other in a fast gentrifying corner of New York's Lower East Side.

In "Lush Life," his eighth novel, Price tells the story of Eric Cash, a restaurant manager and wannabe screenwriter, who becomes both key eyewitness and prime suspect in the murder of his new bartender, Ike Marcus, who is shot while the duo are escorting Ike's drunken friend home after a night of drinking.

Price jumps between Cash's attempts to carry on living while under a police microscope, lead investigator Det. Matty Clark's slow, methodical navigation of the bizarre melting pot of hipster bars and housing projects as he tries to solve the case, and the housing projects -- teeming with young punks eager to prove their street mettle -- that may or may not be home to Ike's killer.

But the book is more than just a crime procedural. Price expertly makes his story's gritty setting come alive with the cop-speak of Matty and his team as they investigate the shooting, the urban slang of the kids in the projects, and the angst of decades-long Lower East side residents losing their territory to wannabe hipsters.

Price has tread this terrain before in his previous offerings, including the acclaimed "Clockers," and "Freedomland." But, as the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.