If there's one thing I enjoy about the frenzy of hyper-commercialism that accompanies the Christmas holiday season, it's the excuse it provides to shop for books. For those lucky enough to have some time off, it is also the ideal season to read -- or at least to make an ambitious reading list for 2012 as a New Year's resolution.

Fearmonger: Stephen Harper's Tough On Crime Agenda
by Paula Mallea (Lorimer 2011; $24.95)

It's a rare event in the Canadian publishing world when non-fiction books line up in sync with current events, but these two titles are perfectly timed as Canadians consider the serious consequences of the Harper government's dramatic omnibus crime bill, one that will radically alter an already deteriorating judicial system.

If you were expecting to read an academic text analyzing justice issues faced by aboriginal peoples in Canada, or a legal text that explained the complex reasons why aboriginal people are overrepresented in the justice system, you would be as disappointed as I was after reading John Reilly's Bad Medicine: A Judge's Struggle for Justice in a First Nations Community. Instead, this book is an odd hybrid of autobiography and newspaper editorial that is more of a tell-all than anything else.

The Ripple Effect by Alex Prud'homme is a needed warning to readers about how current policies, trends and behaviours are quickly threatening the very thing we cannot live without: water.

Prud'homme provides a thorough overview of "some of the most significant water challenges today" from bottled water to "fracking" to dams to cloud seeding. While the case studies focus on the United States, Prud'homme points to global trends and highlights cases in other countries to provide context.

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Today cars are everywhere in our lives, on city streets, printed on glossy magazines pages, flickering on TV screens, referenced in pop songs and embedded in mainstream political discourse.

A brand-new father told me that the (Toronto) hospital nurse wrapped his baby with a blanket which was blue on one side and pink on the other. She swaddled with the blue side out, then realized the newborn was a girl and re-swaddled with the pink side out. All this, about five minutes after birth.

Early in chapter one of Dark Age Ahead, eminent urban theorist Jane Jacobs wrote, unequivocally, "we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age." In Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields, journalist Charles Bowden states in an unnerving prose style that meanders between the voice of a reporter made numb by the telling of uncountable deaths and a poet trying to make sense of violence that is equally random, unbidden, and appalling in its brutality, that the Dark Age is now here.

Michael Keefer has compiled a timely and effective handbook for all those resisting attacks on free speech regarding the Israeli government's crimes against Palestine.

His 268-page book, Anti-Semitism Real and Imagined, contains contributions from 11 committed campaigners in the fight for freedom of expression, as well as position papers from seven well-respected Canadian social organizations.

The book reports on an extra-parliamentary committee named the Canadian Parliamentary Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA), established in 2009 as a lobbying venture by 21 members of Parliament hostile to criticisms of the Israeli government's policies toward the Palestinians.

Someone reading People magazine might conclude that Tom Cruise and Sandra Bullock run Hollywood. While they're certainly influential, so are the directors and producers behind the scenes as well as the financiers and studios that decide what films get made. To truly understand the movie industry, one should investigate the cultural context from which it operates and the economic principles that drive it, divorced from any individual.