The Quivering Pen

The Big Christmas Read

This year for Christmas, I got a kitten.

Well, to be more accurate, Jean and I got a kitten; or maybe, to turn the tables, he got us as gifts. Ember (now a brother to Cinder and Ash) has had a rough start in life. A punctured eyeball from his time at the animal shelter, and a nasty bout of ringworm have all been part of his 12 Days of Christmas. But nothing keeps this cat down for long. He's cute, he's cuddly, and he's a ball of furry energy. He excels at both play-pouncing and purr-cuddling, despite the excruciating pain in his eye socket. In short, he's a friggin' inspiration.
 

While I've had this little bundle of joy on my lap this week, I've been luxuriating in my annual Christmas reading list. Each year, I try to finish reading "that year's books" in preparation for my best books of the year blog post. This time around, I got done a little early: I actually started on my Yuletide reading list before Christmas Day. (Insert wry grin here)

I began with fellow Butte novelist Susan Adrian's new book for middle-graders, Nutcracked. While I took ballet classes in college and performed in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at the University of Wyoming in the early 1980s, I have had the chance to pirouette as Clara, the Sugar Plum Fairy, or even a toy soldier. My career in leotards was mercifully short. But for the space of time I spent with Susan's lovely and captivating novel, I was 12-year-old Georgie, a little girl who has always dreamed of being Clara in The Nutcracker ballet. It's only a mild spoiler to say she gets her wish. But then she dances with the wooden Nutcracker prop and everything changes. Like its namesake story, Nutcracked is full of magic, thrills, charm, hope, and redemption.

Other great holiday reads I've been enjoying: Merry Christmas, Mr. Baxter, a 1956 novel by Edward Streeter, the fellow who wrote Father of the Bride; and some new ghost stories from Biblioasis in its terrific series of vintage supernatural tales (usually, but not always, frosted with Christmas snow). This year, Biblioasis re-issued How Fear Departed the Long Gallery by E. F. Benson (author of the Mapp and Lucia series), The Toll House by W. W. Jacobs, and The Empty House by Algernon Blackwood. The horror is genuine in these pages and I don't mind admitting  there were times my blood ran as cold as my office window pane (it was minus 10 degrees the other night here in Butte, Montana). For all the frightful spooks in the Biblioasis series, Merry Christmas, Mr. Baxter comforted me with its genial humor (though it is definitely a product of its time: pre-feminism and colorblind). It's like reading the jokes in Readers Digest while listening to Mad Men on the TV in the background. I picked up my copy of the novel last year at Elliott Healy Books in Wiscasset, Maine and I've been waiting more than 14 months to read this satire of commercializing Christmas, 1950s-style. Poor George Baxter--all he wants in this world is to make it through another Christmas with his sanity and wallet intact. Starting with early gift-planning in October, it's a delight to watch George slow-burn his way across the calendar.

My final holiday book this year was Murder for Christmas by Francis Duncan, a 1945 novel from the so-called Golden Age of Crime. Duncan and his detective, the sentimental Mordecai Tremaine, certainly give Grand Dames Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers a run for their (blood) money in this first installment of the Tremaine series. Murder for Christmas, re-issued this year by Sourcebooks, is a fun, brisk read for those who like their murder scenes dappled in Santa Claus Red. In fact in these pages, Old Saint Nick himself is found face-down beneath the Christmas tree, shot through the heart. It's up to Mordecai to unravel the motives and opportunities of his fellow guests at an English manor before the next snow falls. Murder for Christmas was so marvelous, I can't wait to explore the rest of the Mordecai Tremaine series.

But now, it's time to get cracking on 2018 books. So many new and promising titles wait for me on my To-Be-Read list that it's overwhelming. I'll never be able to read them all in the coming twelve months. But, you know me--I'll give it a shot. I'm lucky to have an advance copy of Susan Henderson's new novel The Flicker of Old Dreams, so that's where I'll start.

Here's to a happy and entertaining reading year for all of us in 2018!