This week it's the annual holiday gift giving guide for book lovers. Local bookseller Leslie Huerta returns with suggestions for every interest. She’ll introduce new fiction, biography, mysteries, and books about Nebraska. Listen before you shop!

Recently retired UNL English Professor Steve Buhler returns to All About Books with a guest review of “Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys” by Mariana Enriquez. A book of essays looking at noteworthy cemetery’s history, architecture, saints and ghosts.

Making Art seems to be a universal human activity. Why is that, and what does Art actually do? This is explored by composer and music producer Brian Eno in his book “What Art Does: an Unfinished Theory”. It’s a playful and richly illustrated look at Art in our lives.

The book began with a trip to Buchenwald Memorial near Weimar, Germany. UNO English Professor John Price was inspired by a memorial at a massive oak stump- all that was left of a famous oak tree mentioned in German literature and music. “Goethe’s Oak: a Holocaust Memorial” imagines the history this famous tree experienced over the centuries of its long life. Hear an interview with author John Price

On Halloween week, All About Books welcomes UNL Professor of English Dr. Michael Page who will introduce a Gothic thriller and the era that created them. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.

In her memoir, Deborah Jackson Taffa traces how, as a mixed-tribe native girl growing up in the 70’s and 80’s she came to her own understanding of identity. Hear a review of “Whiskey Tender: A Memoir of Family and Survival on and off the Reservation.”

The Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder painted a vivid sense of place with the weather on the Great Plains playing an important role. Dr. Barbara Boustead is a meteorologist and Wilder scholar who researched the accuracy of these stories’ descriptions of blizzards, tornadoes and floods. Hear an interview with Dr. Boustead about her book “Wilder Weather”

On January 28, 1986, a little over a minute into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. The full story of what happened before and after that day is revealed in the new book, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space” by Adam Higginbotham.

Beginning with flight from post-World War II North Africa and Paris, right up to our own time; a multi-generational found-family struggles, lives and loves. Best-selling author Amy Bloom’s new novel is, “I’ll Be Right Here".

In mid-life, Jeff Chu left his job as a magazine writer for grad school at Princeton Theological Seminary. The school had a 21-acre farm, the “Farminary”, where Chu worked. Pat Leach talked to Jeff Chu about his experiences and his book “Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand”