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From The Quivering Pen archives comes this report of my Christmas-themed reading list from 2013. Now that Thanksgiving has been relegated to some congealing leftovers in the refrigerator, I have my jet-packs strapped on and am ready for the Big Christmas Read of 2017. I will post about those books at the blog in the coming weeks; but for now, enjoy this Ghost of Christmas Reading Past...
It happens every year, as predictable as bad drivers after the season's first snow, dust on ornaments brought up from the basement, and tears wrung by Rankin-Bass animated specials: I feel compelled to set aside time for a Christmas-themed book.
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| Beautiful, but blech |
By this point in the calendar, my reading schedule is in a state of Panicked Scramble as I frantically try to finish books I've already started so they can be included in the tally for that year's reading logs (see 2012's "My Year in Reading" post, for example). But in the midst of all that page-turning, I always make time for a special year-end Christmas-y book. Usually, it's an Agatha Christie holiday mystery; last year, I explored Anne Perry's Christmas novels for the first time; and one year, I read a beautifully-illustrated, poorly-written religious-tract-in-the-guise-of-a-novel called The Romance of a Christmas Card by Kate Douglas Wiggin.
This year, I didn't choose one book. I picked out four. It's as ambitious and most likely as knuckle-headed a move as Clark Griswold's Christmas light display in Christmas Vacation. We all know how that ended.
Last week, I started Christmas at High Rising by Angela Thirkell, A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition by Lee Mendelson, The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler, and London Snow by Paul Theroux. Whether or not I blow a fuse and fry myself with this reading plan remains to be seen. For now, I'm getting in the Christmas spirit, dammit--even if it kills me.
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