Author Archives: Kinsey

Please don’t talk to me, middle seat person. I’m reading.

by Kinsey

I spent the last two weeks traveling on business, which meant that I was too exhausted at the end of the day to put two words together for a post, but I got LOTS of reading done in airports, on airplanes, and in hotel rooms and lobbies. While I will spare you descriptions of the many in-flight magazines and celebrity tabloids I read during the enforced no-electronics portions of my flights, here are quick summaries of the books that kept me sane as I criss-crossed the country:

The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides
This was fine, I guess? I was interested in all the characters and I wanted to find out what happened, so it was compelling reading. On the other hand, it was really long and nothing much actually happened and there was almost no resolution of any sort and just because I was interested in the characters didn’t mean I liked them. In fact, pretty much everyone in the book was extremely unpleasant or shallow, so it was a bit like watching a very long, slow train wreck as these characters messed up their lives over and over. I had initially written here that I wanted to warn people about an unflattering portrayal of a character with a mental illness, but all of the characters were portrayed in unflattering ways so the manic depressive actually came out pretty well, comparatively speaking. I loved The Virgin Suicides, so Eugenides has credit in the bank with me, but while The Virgin Suicides felt airy and impressionistic, this dense, heavy, weighty novel feels like it was written by someone else entirely. English majors might like it though, since it seems to feature a lot of inside jokes about literary criticism.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Remember how back in the 1970s a French guy strung a tightrope between the two World Trade Center towers and walked back and forth between the buildings, a hundred floors up with no safety net? This novel describes what was happening in the lives of a number of New York residents on that day, and how they were all connected to the wire walker and to each other. Although it does feature the walker (in real life, his name was Philippe Petit and you can watch an amazing documentary about his walk called Man on Wire), the story isn’t really about him at all. It’s really about New York, and America, in the 1970s–Vietnam, crime in the cities, race, immigration, and how all these things play out in the life a few individuals. As a general rule, I don’t like books that follow multiple characters connected only by the thinnest of threads. However, in this book each character is beautiful and heart-breaking and I found that they all looped together in really satisfying ways. Sad, but lovely.

The Thrift Book by India Knight
I think I’ve explained here before that I want India Knight to be my best friend, so I adored this book, even though it is basically just a list of fairly obvious ways to save money. You know, cook at home, make Christmas presents, grow your own herbs, don’t be fooled by fancy skin creams. Knight puts a fun spin on it by focusing not on getting out of debt or being as cheap as possible, but by talking about all the ways her strategies make you feel (to sound English about it) posher and more glamorous by not trying to hard or getting caught up spending on foolish thing. Plus, she’s funny. At one point she refers to playing Scrabble online as her “ongoing Alzheimer’s prevention project,” which is exactly how I think of Words with Friends. However, if you are not trying to befriend or become India Knight, it’s probably not necessary to read this.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Really fun, and absolutely perfect airplane reading. A sci-fi story that manages to be both a puzzle/treasure hunt and a celebration of 80s pop culture. I think is truly aimed at folks a few years older than I am who spent much more time in video arcades, but I loved it and was so absorbed I was able to read it in even the loudest terminals and restaurants.

Words on the Internets

by Kinsey

I’m in an odd reading place right now, halfway through a bunch of different books and not feeling like any of them are things I want to review. So I thought instead I’d talk about the other main kind of reading I do: online stuff. Yes, I read Twitter and tiny bits of grammatically-incorrect blog content like everyone else, but there is also great, long-form writing to be found on the Internet. Some is just the online presence of traditional print magazines (like the Texas Monthly article I’m about to recommend) but lots of it is unique to the web and you shouldn’t miss it just because it is not on paper. Here are three of the best long-form pieces I’ve read online lately:

1) The Body on Somerton Beach by Mike Dash

The Smithsonian blog posted this fabulous article about the decades-old mystery of a body found on an Australian beach. I watch enough 48 Hours Mystery and Dateline episodes to know that most murders are just not that complicated. The murderer is generally a spouse or someone that the victim owed money to, and the stories generally don’t get more exciting than that. I came away from this article convinced that the (still unknown!) truth behind this mystery man is way more exciting than anything I will ever come up with.

2) Winona Ryder’s Forever Sweater by Sarah Miller

It’s an article about . . . a sweater? And friendship? And becoming an adult? I don’t know how to describe it, but I found it sweet and funny and insightful.

3) The Lost Boys by Skip Hollandsworth

Okay, the last two articles were comparatively light and non-traumatizing, so let me warn you that this one is not. This is sad and features a lot of dead and missing children. (That sentence was for my friend Liz. She and I recently went to see The Woman in Black and agree that it needed some sort of warning that the central plot point involved MULTIPLE dead children.)  This Texas Monthly article about a serial killer who operated in Houston back before any one talked about serial killers, is amazing and heartbreaking. It specifically focuses on how, prior to the Internet and social media and easy communication between law enforcement agencies, it was almost impossible for the Houston police or the community to connect a series of disappearances of young boys. Instead, the police dismissed the individual cases as runaways and grieving families were left with no answers for decades.

Finally, I know I just said that I hate watching videos on the computer and I do, but this one about the what books in bookstores do at night when no one is around is worth making an exception for.

The Fault in our Stars by John Green

by Kinsey

I promise that I don’t only read YA books. I’ve actually read a number of fancy grown-up books lately that I’m planning to write about, but first I’ve got to talk about one more YA book, because it apparently the hottest thing around right now–The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.

Now, Green is a big deal in YA circles and he has written a number of well-received and well-loved books, including Looking for Alaska and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (that one was with David Levitan). Plus, he and his brother have this whole YouTube thing where they post videos and, I don’t know, they also sing or something? To be honest, I don’t really understand all of this because I don’t like watching videos online. Yes, yes, I am very old, I just think that the computer is for reading and the TV is for moving pictures. But apparently kids today love all that video stuff, and you can read more about the whole John Green thing at the Kidliterate review.

His latest book, which debuted at Number 1 on the New York Times Children’s Chapter Books List (you know, the one created so Harry Potter wouldn’t knock all the pretentious adult books off the NYT list) is about two teenagers with cancer who fall in love. Cheerful, I know. But the thing about John Green is that it doesn’t really matter what any of his books are about, exactly–his strength is his characters and dialogue. He’s got a sharp sense of humor and creates teenagers who are precocious and flawed and funny and real. His voice is so strong and specific that each time I open one of his books I feel like a crisp breeze blows out of the pages.

One of my favorite sources of book recommendations on the Internet is Elizabeth at Princess Nebraska and she wrote a review of The Fault in Our Stars that pretty much says everything I want to say. I found it really interesting that she says that the first of Green’s books she read was Looking for Alaska and it was still her favorite. The first of his books I read was Paper Towns and it’s still my favorite, so I wonder if Green’s stuff is so striking that you’re always bound to love the one you first read the most. So while The Fault in Our Stars isn’t my favorite, it’s definitely very good and I would highly recommend any of John Green’s stuff. And I suppose you could watch some of his videos too, since I hear they’re popular with the young folks.

Awards Season

by Kinsey

In addition to Oscar season, it’s also American Library Association Youth Media Award season! Am I the only one who remembers being gleeful when the Newberry Medal was announced each year? I didn’t care about the Caldecott (didn’t like picture books then, don’t like graphic novels now), but the Newberry was a highlight of my year. Would it be something I’d already read? Would it be a history book that wanted me to learn something (Lincoln: A Photobiography) or a story so fun I still reread it as an adult (The Westing Game)? The 2012 ALA winners were announced this week, although since I am actually not 10 years old anymore some of their other awards capture me more than the Newberry.

The Printz award is given to YA books, and we all know how I feel about YA. This year’s winner was Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley. The Honor Books were:

Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler, art by Maira Kalman
The Returning by Christine Hinwood
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey
The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater

I haven’t read any of those–in fact, the only one I’ve heard of is The Scorpio Races. My experience with Maggie Stiefvater (fun fact: her last name means stepfather in German) is through an entertaining but slightly cheesy trilogy of werewolf books that starts with Shiver, but the reviews I’ve been seeing of The Scorpio Races are in another league so I’ll have to check that one out. Another fun fact about the Honor Books: Daniel Handler is also Lemony Snicket of the Series of Unfortunate Events books, so he’s doing well on several fronts.

Another award category that caught my eye is the Alex Awards for the 10 best adult books that appeal to teen audiences. For 2012 the list is:

Big Girl Small by Rachel DeWoskin
In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard
The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan
The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Robopocalypse: A Novel by Daniel H. Wilson
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: A Novel in Pictures by Caroline Preston
The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo

I have to say that I’m not entirely sure I understand this award. Looking at the award policies, it doesn’t appear that the authors have to think that teenagers will like their books, the awards committee simply gets to decide which are the 10 best books each year that have a special appeal to teen readers. But as former teenager who read lots of adult books, and as a current adult who reads lots of teen books, this award seems like it was made to give me a reading list. I think that Ready Player One might be up next.

The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson

by Kinsey

Remember when I complained about All These Things I’ve Done being so unsatisfying, because it was the first book in a planned series and all it did was set it up for interesting things to happen in later books? The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson does NOT have that problem. This is another YA fantasy book with a kick-ass young female protagonist, and another book that is leading off a planned series (The Shades of London), but this one walks the line between providing a complete story and setting up future action perfectly.

Rory is a New Orleans high school student who decides to attend a boarding school in London while her college professor parents are on sabbatical in England. Her school is in London’s East End, in the neighborhood where the Jack the Ripper killings took place and shortly after Rory arrives in town a copycat starts recreating the murders. As if that weren’t creepy enough, Rory begins to get the feeling that something strange is going on and that she can see things her classmates can’t. I’m sure you can all guess that something supernatural is going on and that Rory quickly finds herself at the heart of the mystery.

My favorite thing about this book is Rory’s voice–she’s funny and sarcastic and she sounds modern, like a teenager talking today (or at least, what I think teenagers today sound like). She also has a pretty distinctly Southern voice but doesn’t come off like a hick, which I (as a Southerner) always appreciate. The London stuff was nicely atmospheric and (without giving too much away) the fantasy side of things was sufficiently creepy. I also liked, as you probably guessed, that the book manages to wrap up a major mystery with a thrilling final action scene that provides a great deal of closure. But at the same time, the very last page of the book introduces a new twist that made me so excited about the possibilities of the next book I immediately went to Amazon to see if there was a publication date for book two (there’s not). The Name of the Star feels like the start of something new, while also being a satisfying story all by itself. My only small complaint is that it took a long time for things to get going, and a significant portion of the book is just Rory settling into school and having vaguely odd experiences that she doesn’t pay attention to but that the readers know are significant. As a reader, I like feeling smart enough to pick up on subtle hints but this almost tipped over into Rory seeming dumb, since I had figured things out and was just waiting for her to catch up. Since I read this on my Kindle I can be very precise about how much of the book was just working up to the real action and Rory’s discovery of the true nature of things: 47%, which seems like a lot. However, once things get going they are really going, and I suspect that in the future when folks read a few of the books in close succession the time spent introducing things will be less distracting. Again, minor quibble.

A while back BBCAmerica showed a mystery series called Whitechapel that was essentially this same plot, minus the supernatural element and told from the perspective of the detectives. If you find the Jack the Ripper aspect of the story interesting, you might also enjoy tracking down the TV series.

The Great Night, by Chris Adrian

by Kinsey

Chris Adrian’s The Great Night has been getting fabulous reviews everywhere, including on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, my favorite podcast ever and the thing that makes my commute bearable. The book is billed as a retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in modern-day San Francisco. I liked the book and would recommend it, but I think anyone interested in reading it should keep two things in mind:

1) It’s more “inspired by” than a retelling. This is not Clueless, where you can find an exact parallel to almost every character and plot point. Yes, there are fairies and it is Midsummer Eve, but from there the plot’s relation to Shakespeare’s play gets hazier. In this version, Titania and Oberon rule the fairy world under a San Francisco park, but their marriage is breaking under the weight of their grief over the death of a human changeling boy they had adopted. Puck is not, well, puck-ish but is (to quote NPR’s PCHH) a Big Bad who is freed from service to the King and Queen and is now out for revenge. Humans are involved, but it’s not two pairs of lovers, it’s three single city residents all on their way to the same party, who get trapped in the park when Puck is freed. And remember the “rude mechanicals,” like Bottom with the donkey’s head? In this story those are the homeless people also trapped in the park during Puck’s rampage.

2) The tone is . . . dark. I know that the play deals with themes that are not all sunshine and roses, including the fickleness of love, our lack of free will, etc. But I’ve always thought of the play as one of Shakepeare’s works that is is easy to watch–everyone lives, it’s funny and pretty and there is usually music and people dressed up in fairy wings. But this is not a happy book, or a playful book, or a light-hearted book. It’s overall theme is one of loss, and how people chose to deal with their losses. Titania and Oberon were suffering from the death of (what they considered) their child, while the human characters are all struggling to figure out how to carry on with their lives after their own tragedies.

But while it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, it is a beautiful book. I don’t particularly like San Francisco (in fairness, I’ve only been there once and it was in June, which is apparently the February of San Francisco), but Adrian’s descriptions make it seem like the city that would have fairies, if any one did. The passages where Titania’s changeling son is dying are both spell-binding and heartbreaking. She’s not a likeable character, but her grief is so real it is painful to read. She and Oberon are forced to take the boy to a human hospital for treatment, and the absurdity of the fairies trying to interact with and understand the human world is striking. I’ve obviously never been in this situation, but I wonder if a hospital–specifically the children’s cancer ward–would seem just as surreal and otherworldly to any parent with critically ill child. When the author is not writing critical beloved books, he’s a pediatric oncologist (don’t we all feel unaccomplished now?) and the parts of the book that talk about medical treatments and hospitals and doctors’ lives have a feeling of authenticity. I also enjoyed how the storylines of the various characters, human and fairy, overlapped in unexpected ways. I don’t want to give anything way, but I found the connections very satisfying.

This is a book that requires some faith–you have to read along and trust that the story and relatonships between the characters will become clear, but it’s one that has stayed with me days after I finished it.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson

by Kinsey

Happy 2012, everyone! My year started off with someone backing into my car on New Year’s Eve and a wave of bitter, bitter cold sweeping over my city, as if even the weather was buckling down and getting back to work. Nonetheless, I had a wonderful holiday and am really excited about what 2012, especially what new books I will read. I plan to do a fair amount of traveling the first part of this year and am actually looking forward to the time in airports and on buses to get some reading done. Nothing like winter travel to ensure that you will have hours and hours to nothing but read and watch your flights get delayed.

To finish up my 2011 books, the best thing I read over the holidays was The Magician King by Lev Grossman, which is the sequel to The Magicians. I raved about how much I loved The Magicians and I liked the follow-up just as much. I don’t want to say anything about the plot of characters, because it could spoil things for people who haven’t read the first one, so let me just say that I thought they were both great, everyone should go read them both, and I am very much looking forward to the planned third book.

The book I can talk about is also great, although in a different way. The Girl of Fire and Thornsis the latest in my winter string of YA books featuring kick-ass female protagonists, and it’s my favorite so far. Elisa is the younger princess of a small country and as the book starts she is being married off to the king of a neighboring land, as part of a treaty that will unite the two nations against an aggressive enemy that is threatening them both. Elisa is smart and understands the political necessity of the marriage, but she is also insecure, overweight, in the shadow of her capable older sister, and overwhelmed at the idea of being queen of a foreign nation. And when she gets to her new home she learns that her husband hasn’t told anyone they’re married, leaving her stuck in the middle of a political mess. To top it all off, Elisa is the one child chosen by God every 100 years to bear the Godstone, a sign that she has been selected to perform a great service, but she has so little faith in herself that she is scared she won’t even recognize the service when she sees it.

From this starting point, the book follows a military and political storyline as the country prepares for war, but the real focus is Elisa’s development as a person and a leader. There is a terrible trope in fiction (both YA and adult) in which the fat girl loses weight and finds herself, and I had a moment of panic early in this book when I thought that was where things might be going. However, Carson does a great job of showing how Elisa doesn’t become an entirely new (thin) person, but uses the skills and intelligence she always had to rise to the occasion and do what needs to be done. Yes, she loses weight along the way (why can’t a character just be fat and awesome for once?) but it’s made clear that this is not the most important change. Elisa’s voice is so clear throughout the story that her progression from scared teenager to capable adult feels like real, believable growth.

I will also say this: The Girl of Fire and Thorns surprised me constantly. As much as I love YA books, they can sometimes be predictable, and there were a few plots twists in this one that I did not expect at all. And while there could be a sequel that continues the story, and I would happily spend more time with Elisa, this is a complete and satisfying book all on it’s own. I’ve still got a pile of YA fantasy waiting for me, but I suspect this one will stay very high on my list.

All These Things I’ve Done

by Kinsey

I think I’ve mentioned here how much I love young adult books, but just to reiterate: I love them a lot. There are loads of YA books out there and, as with any genre, it’s key to have a trusted source to help you sort out the pearls from the muck. My favorite YA source is Kidliterate, which reviews picture books for little kids but is also a fabulous place to learn about new and upcoming books for teens (and grownups). The site’s creator works for an independent bookstore, so she reviews things from a bookseller’s perspective, meaning you sometimes get interesting inside information on the expected audience or potential controversies. But she never spoils the books, so there’s no need to worry about getting too much information. I was thrilled to see that the Kidliterate folks have posted a whole flurry of holiday recommendations, including a list of YA books with “awesome teen girls” as the main character. I’ve immediately put every one of those on my library list, but until they start coming in I can talk about Gabrielle Zevin’s All These Things I’ve Done.

Zevin has written a number of other YA books, including 2005’s Elsewhere. That one is about a girl who dies and ends up in the afterlife, where you age backwards until you’re a baby and you are born again back into the world. Which sounds dumb, frankly–when I heard the description of this books I remember thinking clearly that it was Not a Book for Me. But a friend with a solid YA track record recommended it, and I found it charming. It was a bit like reading a fairy tale or a fable, but at the same time had a very matter-of-fact attitude towards death and the afterlife that never made me, as an extremely nonreligious reader, uncomfortable.

All These Things I’ve Done is about Anya Balanachine, a teenager living in New York City in 2083. In this particular dystopian future there are shortages of everything, the city is rife with crimes–the standard. More specifically to this universe, coffee and chocolate have been outlawed and Anya’s father made their family fortune as a crime boss in the chocolate underground. Both her parents are now dead, so underage Anya is responsible for keeping her family together and trying to keep them out of trouble and out of the family business. It’s YA, so there’s also a cute boy and a school dance.

I enjoyed the book and it had some lovely touches. Although it’s set in the future, Anya’s world feels very accessible, close enough to our world to be easy to imagine and different in believable ways. For example, producing new materials is so difficult that the teenagers wear vintage clothes when they go out–this is both logical and let me imagine that Anya and her friends were wearing clothes from my closet. And the New York the characters live in is certainly different, but still recognizable. I also really like the matter-of-fact way the book handles how Anya feels about her father’s organized crime involvement and how it affects the way other characters treat her. It’s clearly something she struggles with, especially as the book goes on, but not something she can afford to get overly dramatic about. Anya’s relationships with her sister and brother also feel very real–loving, but occasionally irritated.

I had one major issue with the book, however: I didn’t realize until I was nearly halfway through that this is first book in a series (the Birthright series) and it reads that way. As much as I enjoyed All These Things I’ve Done, it felt like a really long introduction to a story. Just when I started thinking to myself, “All right, NOW we can get going!” the book ended. Which bodes well the book two, whenever it comes out, but leaves book one as an unfinished story in my mind. I know this is probably my own fault for not researching enough before I started reading, but am I going to have to start assuming that every YA book is part of series unless I am specifically told otherwise? Look, I love being able to read two or three or more books about characters that I love, but I do need for those books to stand alone. The Hunger Games may have always been planned as the first in a trilogy, but it is a complete, satisfying story with a sense of conclusion and ending. Or, you know what, it doesn’t necessarily even have to stand alone. The second two Hunger Games books can’t stand by themselves, and I adore the Mortal Instrument books by Cassandra Clare, which are not  independent stories and are full of cliffhangers. Maybe the real issue is that I need to feel like I got my money’s worth, so to speak, out of the book. I want to feel like it was a piece of writing worth my time. And this one felt like a very long introduction to characters who are going to get to the real action later.  I think my suggestion here is to go read Elsewhere now, and then come back and read the Birthright series in a few years when more books are out and the story feels more like a meal and less like an appetizer.

And now I am off to wrap a million presents and celebrate with my family. Happy holidays to all of our tens of readers and here’s to a 2012 full of good books!

In the Garden of Beasts and A Thousand Lives

by Kinsey

I do most of my reading at night, right before I fall asleep. Which can be problematic when I’m reading something creepy, since I end up either laying in bed listening for suspicious noises or having nightmares where I’m chased by evil book characters. So it probably wasn’t very wise of me to read In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson and then follow it up with A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown by Julia Scheeres. This late-night unsettling reading, combined with the Nyquil I’m taking for a cold I picked up traveling last week, has led to some very bizarre dreams. But I would recommend both books to people reading during daylight hours, and they work surprisingly well together. They each examine why people choose to follow madmen who lead them to do terrible things, both to themselves and others–the difference is in the scale.

In the Garden of Beasts is about the American ambassador to Germany in the 1930s, and describes his family’s life in Berlin as Hitler rose to power. It focuses on 1933, the turning point when Hitler consolidated his power, and it’s basically an entire book of foreshadowing. Larson is describing elegant Berlin parties and the love interests of the ambassador’s daughter, but we all know how this story ends. I occasionally got a overwhelmed by the level of detail, and I wished I had an org chart to help keep all the minor diplomats and German politicians straight. However, Larson does a wonderful job of creating a sense of oppression and fear. I could feel myself getting more and more tense as I read, wishing I could jump into the pages and tell all these people to get out of Berlin before things got any worse.

A Thousand Lives tells a much smaller story. Scheeres uses FBI documents to describe the rise of Jim Jones, from his very early days as a minister in Indiana to his horrible end in Guyana. (I can’t bear to type out any details, if you don’t know the story you can check out the Wikipedia page.) She follows a number of individuals, detailing why the church originally appealed to them, how their views of the church evolved, and how they ended up in Guyana. I hadn’t realized how initially progressive Jones’s teaching on race and class issues was and that was fascinating, but it’s an ominous, disturbing book. Not all of the individuals profiled in the book died in Jonestown, but there aren’t any happy endings here.

I liked both books, but I think Larson did a better job of explaining how good, rationale people could get caught up in such a situation. I was struck by the number of people who thought from the very beginning that Hitler and his cronies were lunatics, but chose to stay in Germany because they assumed that at any minute sense would prevail and the Nazis would be thrown out of power. By the time they realized that madness was going to win the day, it was too late for them to get out and Hitler had too much power to defeat. Sheeres also describes how people had serious doubts about Jones and his church, and how many tried to escape or stand up to Jones. However, for me she doesn’t get to the heart of why people followed Jones when he was so obviously mad. Hitler had the power of the German state behind him to enforce his choices, but it seems like Jones’s followers could have walked away once he he started abusing children and talking about conspiracies. (At least, they could have while they were in the U.S.–Scheeres makes it clear that once Jones got his followers to Guyana, they were trapped and had virtually no way to escape.) Maybe it is personality trait: I can imagine myself deciding not to emigrate away from my home country, choosing instead to stick it out and hope things improved, but I find it very hard to imagine giving up my life and following a religious leader to a foreign country. As thoughtful as A Thousand Lives was, it still didn’t explain the attraction of Jim Jones, while Larson created a disturbing picture of a society that is too easy to imagine myself in.

I have got to find myself some more cheerful things to read, but if you’re interested in some 20th century history and ready to start building a time machine so you can go back and rescue people, I would recommend In the Garden of Beasts and A Thousand Lives.

Christmas Reads

by Kinsey

Now that Thanksgiving is over I can officially start one of my annual holiday traditions: the rereading of the Christmas books. I don’t tend to decorate much, but there’s a certain set of books that makes it feel like Christmas to me.

Miracle and Other Christmas Stories by Connie Willis
I am alternatively thrilled and aggravated by Connie Willis. To Say Nothing of the Dog is one of my favorite books, but Blackout and All Clear were interminable (this does not mean that I didn’t cry at the end, because I totally did). But I adore this book of Christmas short stories and read it every year. Each story has at least a hint of science fiction about them, but the stories span the range of emotions. There’s a romantic comedy that involves aliens invading at Christmas and a haunting thriller about three modern-day wise men driving across the U.S. in a blizzard. In my favorite story, Mary and Jesus accidentally stumble through time into a modern day church during Christmas preparations, and a busy mom has to help them get back to Bethlehem. Plus, the forward to the book includes Willis’s own list of favorite holiday books and movies.

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice
This one is not overly Christmas-y–although it does feature a Christmas scene–but  for some reason it puts me in a cozy, holiday state of mind. Perhaps because the story about British teenagers in the 1950s is so pretty and candy-colored that it feels like a fairy tale. I’ve read about a trillion books set in WWII England, but hardly any about the generation that came of age immediately after the war, so this offers a slightly different perspective.

Olive, the Other Reindeer
Yes, it’s a kids’ book, but it’s got a small dog! Named Olive! It’s just charming.

Comfort and Joy by India Knight
This just came out last year, but it immediately earned a permanent place on my list of holiday books. There’s not a lot of plot here, it’s just the story of a modern-day, many-branched English family trying to sort out how to celebrate Christmas. I adore India’s blog and love following her on Twitter because her writing makes you feel like you’ve just sat down with her to have a cup of tea and tell scandalous stories about all your mutual friends. This book feels exactly the same way and is full of all sorts of wonderful family and holiday details. I had to order mine from Amazon.co.uk last year, but now you can can get a nice, affordable American version.

Also, I think all of us would happier people if we all rewatched While You Were Sleeping during this time of year.