Today is the 10th day of Christmas and since Claire and I celebrate all 12 Days of the season (this post over on Vital Signs Blog will give you more about that), it’s still very much within bounds to pass along a few more Christmas reading tips.
1) My first tip is a negative. By all means avoid Mr. Ives’ Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos.
I really tried but after 140 pages sprinkled with needless “grittiness” (that’s the uptown literary term for nasty bits), I packed it in. Also, I was irritated by the author's excessive preaching about authentic spirituality being a mix of irrational subjectivism and other Eastern religious themes. (Why is it, I wonder, that the literati are bothered by "preachiness" only when it is done by orthodox Christians?)
Anyway...Hijuelos is a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and I kept hoping that Mr. Ives’ Christmas would get round to the “sense of awe and wonder for those who seek to sustain their faith in an increasingly faithless world” as the book jacket promised. No such luck. When the object of one’s faith is the unknown, the unobtainable or even the falsely promised, faith is nothing but an emotional condition. And the reader whose emotional state is improved by reading Mr. Ives’ Christmas must be woefully poor in the first place.
Much better alternatives are any of the readings I’ve already listed right here and here and the other four mentioned below that I discovered just the last few days.
2) The Quiet Little Woman: A Christmas Story by Louisa May Alcott. Actually, this little book (published by Honor Books in Tulsa) includes three Alcott Christmas stories. Stephen Hines is a newspaper columnist who loves to “rediscover” quality literature and in this pocket-sized 122-page book, he gives readers a chance at Alcott stories that have gone unread for decades. So don’t miss "The Quiet Little Woman," "Tilly’s Christmas" and "Rosa’s Tale" by Louisa May Alcott next Christmas.
3) Claire joins me in giving a hearty recommendation to John Snyder’s The Golden Ring: A Christmas Story published by Warner Books in 1999. A bittersweet story marked by Christian faith, family values and a heart-stirring plot, The Golden Ring was a nice surprise that I found in the public library. This too is one to mark down for early next Christmas to check out from your own local library. Better yet, order it online at www.johnsnyder.net where you can get an autographed copy. That, by the way, would make a nifty Christmas present too.
4) Bess Streeter Aldrich, an underrated writer who is one of Nebraska's own, penned a very moving story in 1937 for the Hearst magazines called "The Drum Goes Dead." It is closer to a short story than a novel but it was published in book form by Appleton in 1941. That is how you could most easily obtain it from your library or perhaps inter-library loan. Because The Drum Goes Dead is such a realistic, hopeful read for Christmas, I would encourage you (especially you Nebraska readers of The Book Den) to make the effort.
5) Another classic that is much too neglected by modern readers is Washington Irving's Old Christmas, a series of splendid portraits of English Christmases first published in 1875. Irving, most famous for his stories of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle, is in fine form in Old Christmas as he shares beloved Yuletide customs from his adopted country. Rich in detail; rich in fun facts about holiday history; and rich in Christmas comfort and cheer, Irving's Old Christmas is a treasure.
