Tag: Christmas

December reading round-up

Christmas bokeh

Well I hope you’ve all had a few days off work and eaten far too much and maybe even found some time to escape into a quiet corner and read. I didn’t get much reading done over Christmas because, as predicted, meeting my newest niece was quite the distraction! Plus it was good to spend some time with my family and old friends, as well as just enjoying being back in the beautiful Forest of Dean for a week.

Having a cuddle with my niece.
Having a cuddle with my niece.

Tomorrow I’ll write a round-up of my year in reading, but for now here’s what I read in December. You’ll notice it’s significantly less than the number of books I was given for Christmas 🙂

Christmas bookses

Books
All is Fair by Emma Newman (review here)

Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk (review here)

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

And as I’m writing this a day early, I’m hoping I will have finished Paradises by Iosi Havilio by midnight tomorrow!

Short stories
“Xingu” by Edith Wharton (Selected Shorts podcast)

“How to relax while broadcasting” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The topaz cufflinks mystery” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“A ride with Olympy” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“Macbeth murder mystery” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The secret life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The babysitter” by Jane Yolen (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The wood duck” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“Here we are” by Dorothy Parker (Selected Shorts podcast)

“Just a little one” by Dorothy Parker (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The waltz” by Dorothy Parker (Selected Shorts podcast)

There’s a bit of a pattern to my short stories this month, I notice! This was a particularly good bunch, I thought.

 

Happy New Year, all.

Merry Christmas everyone!

I’ve wrapped the presents, picked out my Christmas Day outfit and had too many Christmas drinks already. I thought I’d share a favourite Christmas tune with you to keep the blog ticking over while I’m busy with family. I do love a good Christmas song.

I have no idea if I’ll find time for reading (I have a new niece to play with and there’s a lot of enthusiasm for board games this year…) but I do (of course) have a stack of books lined up that I’m hoping to snatch a few hours with at some point in the next week and a half off work.

Happy holidays!

Sunday Salon: New year, new books

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The Sunday Salon

Every year when my family asks what I want for Christmas and my birthday (they’re pretty close together) I give them a wishlist that is 90% books and every time I have to reassure them that yes, books really really are what I want. You’d think they’d learn. Thankfully, they know me well enough to buy me said books, in addition to a few useful things.

Even though I already own 120 or so unread books and a couple of thousand read books that I have kept because I want to re-read them some day, it makes me super happy to see this stack of new books.

Christmas books

If you can’t quite read those spines, the books are:

Cairo: My City, Our Revolution by Ahdaf Soueif
The Wine of Solitude by Irène Némirovsky
The Birds and other stories by Daphne du Maurier
The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler
The Most Remarkable Woman in England by John Carter Wood
No Surrender by Constance Maud (that’s the pretty Persephone edition)
Burmese Days by George Orwell
The Dark Side of Love by Rafik Schami

And despite already having all of those lovely new books, I tripped and bought a book yesterday – the first trade paperback volume of Sandman by Neil Gaiman (and if I like it there’s 11 further volumes to buy!) – while Tim was picking up his latest comics and earlier this week I ordered a book from Abe Books to complete my collection of the Claudine series by Colette. Can I help wanting to give a loving home to all the books?

Oh, and I also received a belated Christmas card via the Book Bloggers Holiday Card Exchange. This one is from Vasilly and came in a very pretty shiny envelope and contains a great quote about reading.

Card exchange prettiness

Yay, I love Christmas and birthdays! Just eleven and a half months to go to the next time. Did you get any great books lately?

New year, new books

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Happy new year!

I now have a lot of new books, except I only physically have half of them so the photo doesn’t look as impressive as it might do. Stupid rubbish postal service. Not that I read fast enough to get through these before the end of the month.

So these are the books I received for Christmas…

Stack of books

An Image of Africa by Chinua Achebe
Silly Novels by Lady Novelists by George Eliot
And Now You Can Go by Vendela Vida
Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years by Sue Townsend
Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver
The Breaking Point and other stories by Daphne du Maurier

…and if anything I have less reading time than last year, so this should be an interesting exercise in time management. Please don’t judge me if it takes months for my reviews of these titles to appear!

Christmas sledging fun

The snow stuck around just long enough for us to replace our traditional Christmas Day walk with sledging up at the local park. It’s the same park my siblings and I sledged in as children so it was a real memory lane moment to be up there with a variety of sleds, my Dad throwing himself enthusiastically down every slope while I took it a little easier. The light was falling so I didn’t get many photos, but here are a few to show the great fun we had.

Practice run on a gentle slope:
On your marks

Tim following my Dad’s cue by going headfirst:
Whoosh

Kitty the dog didn’t get that sledging and fetch are a tad incompatible:

Holly the dog was content to just dig around in the snow:
Digging

Happy holidays!

A bit of festive cheer

Comfort and Joy
by India Knight

Some people might classify this as chicklit, not my usual genre, but as Dervla would say this time of year, this is no ordinary chicklit; this is chicklit that absolutely completely struck a chord with me. Plus, it’s Christmassy.

Clara is 40 and is scrambling around Oxford Street on 23 December to complete the perfect Christmas she has planned for her 16 guests, including her three children, husband and ex-husband. The book follows her through the ensuing mayhem of family, friends and Christmas.

Knight mercilessly mocks the middle-class boreishness. I mean, these people are London middle class, which is a whole separate sub-class of its own. They obsess over the provenance of their food (in fact, food in general) and PTA meetings and how to give their children everything without spoiling them. Clara herself is painfully aware that these are not issues most of the world has the luxury of worrying about and besides, she finds it boring. What happened to those youthful days of discussing politics?

There are some painfully real moments and Clara can be a little vicious in her own mind, but she loves the people around her and this shines through. Her sisters are particularly wonderful characters and their shared history and language are joyous to be part of.

I laughed out loud many a time but I also appreciated the main “lesson” that Clara learns – that your true family is the one that’s there for you, the people who “taught me to swim, and everything that that’s shorthand for” as she puts it. Broken marriages and jumbled extended families may be nothing new but I suspect there’s still a lot of people out there trying to negotiate the tricky waters of which parents, step-parents, half-brothers and ex-step-granddads they keep in touch with. It’s always nice to know that someone else is struggling with the same issue.

Knight has got right into the Christmas tradition by writing about Christmas past, present and future. I loved that touch, though the future Christmas was rather less bleak than Dickens’. If you’re not one for making a fuss about Christmas, this may not be the book for you. But I loved it. I stayed up far too late into the night to finish it and then felt a little sad that it was over so soon.

Merry Christmas and happy holiday reading!

Published 2010 by Penguin.