My Christmas vacation was two weeks of dreary, rainy, cold days. Two weeks of dreary, rainy, cold days that were...perfect. Yes, perfect. I'd have been dismayed if I'd hoped for two weeks at the beach but that is not what I'd hoped for. They were perfect for me. They were perfect for reading.
I planned the weeks carefully. Three weeks before the start of our Christmas break I requested every wish list book I could find from two libraries that (1) have enormous and diverse collections and (2) are a little too far away to visit more than a few times a year. Happily, twenty-one books came in from the two libraries on the first day of break. Perfect.
I also got eight books for Christmas (wowza!) that I added to my reading stacks. And a couple of review books arrived in the mail.
And so how did I spend my Christmas vacation? Yes, I think you see how I spent my days. A nice pot of coffee. A big comfortable reading chair. An enormous warm quilt. And a huge stack of possible reads.
I Read-at-Will. I read and I read and I read. Then I read a little more. And a bit more.
Some of the books I'd eagerly anticipated did not work for me. I'd read and adored The Roads to Sata: A 2,000 Mile Walk Through Japan last year and I couldn't wait to read Alan Booth's only other travel narrative, Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan, but I never could get into it and sadly set it aside. Making Marks: Discovering the Art of Intuitive Drawing would have made a better magazine article than an entire book. There were several other disappointments that I won't share here, but I will say that's how it goes with books: Not every hoped-for book delivers.
On the other hand, I read three incredible browsable books and three fiction books that I must share with you now.
First the fiction books. One is Station Eleven, and you've probably already heard enough about that one (you may have even already read it yourself!) I'll just nod my head to Station Eleven and say, Dark and sad and spell-binding and thoughtful. A yes to Station Eleven. The second is The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Volume 1. It's a collection of the shortest short stories you ever did read. The stories are the length and breadth of a whisper, but they echo with such deep truth and clever wordplay that you feel compelled to read them again and again. The other fiction book is The Rosie Effect, and I have to remind you that it's second in the series, so you need to read The Rosie Project first, but that's quite good, too. Our main characters, Rosie and Don, are completely unsuited for each other, and both, in their own ways, are totally unsocial, so their unexpected romance in Project and their complicated marriage in Effect are delightful reads.
Now the browsable nonfiction books. If you have any interest in the Big Questions about the Universe, you need to find What If today. I have to admit that I didn't understand most of the science, but the questions asked and the author's cartoonish drawings and the gist of the answers that I did understand were good reading. The Lives of the Novelists could have been an awful, textbook-ish thing, but it wasn't; instead, I spent hours and hours reading through all the stories about novelists I thought I knew (and didn't) and novelists I'd never heard of (and should have and now I do and I'm glad). Letters of Note is a vast collection of the most interesting letters you have ever read. Lots of them you probably already know, like Virginia's letter to Santa Claus and the letter of an aspiring poet to Rilke, but there are zillions here that you haven't and you really should.
So there it is. I also read Murakami's new The Strange Library; and a graphic novel from Lucy Knisley, An Age of License; and a baking story, In Search of the Perfect Loaf; a book on creativity by Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds; a memoir by the wonderful writer Mark Salzman about his years spent coping with anxiety called The Man in the Empty Boat; a book about play (since that's my word for the year) called Play; and a memoir about a girl who fought her troubles with alcohol by restoring an early love for birds, The Bird Market of Paris. All quite good reads.
