The Dreaded December Book-of-the-Month
Posted by: Admin
The hardest book-of-the-month to choose for our book club and our bookstore always comes at the end of the year.
It can’t just be the best book. It needs to be short enough to read during the most socially-crowded month. It needs to be upbeat enough that it works with the holidays, not against them. It needs to be the kind of book that can also be a gift. Sometimes I’m lucky and stumble on a book like Orhan Pamuk’s wonderful Istanbul or Dominika Dery’s charming The Twelve Little Cakes, and everyone’s happy. The book sells well in the bookstore, the club members thoroughly enjoy it. One year we read W. Somerset Maugham’s very, very short The Painted Veil and went to see the excellent film together as a holiday outing. It was one of our most delightful times.
Unfortunately, the books I’m reading this month just aren’t right for December.
Take Max Blecher’s Scarred Hearts, the new translation of a Romanian novel from 1937, written by a young Jewish man with spinal tuberculosis who died at the age of twenty-nine. The novel takes place in a sanatorium in France, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever read before, though it has echoes of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. But it’s much grimmer, and debilitating disease does not make good holiday reading. The inmates wear body casts they call corsets, and the best that secret lovers can do is rub their casts against each other. I bailed when two lovers got a little carried away and the man’s open fistules drained, creating a disgusting, green wet mess and causing the permanent removal of my bookmark.
I toyed briefly with the well-written memoir by Christopher Lukas, Blue Genes, told by the brother of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who committed suicide. But discovering a family secret of suicidal tendencies isn’t holiday reading, either. For any other month but December.
There’s Asne Seierstad’s brave, troubling The Angel of Grozny. I adore Asne Seierstad – she’s one brave, committed Norwegian journalist whose book, The Bookseller of Kabul, was a shout in the silence when it first came out – and her new book, about Chechnya, does have a cute kid on the cover – true, he’s a war orphan with a machine gun in his hands and appears to be imitating a warrior’s leap, but still, a kid. It could pass for a holiday book – it does have “angel” in the title – though it’s probably more heartbreaking than heartwarming.
Aiiieeeee, I’m running out of books – and then this afternoon I was handed an advance by Karen Pennington, our Random House rep, at a presentation to the University Book Store staff of holiday titles. Coming out next Tuesday is Daniel L. Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, a memoir of a Christian missionary and his family in the Amazonian jungle who encounter a tribe who convert the author away from fundamentalism. Now there’s one I’ve never heard of before! It doesn’t look like an easy read, and the author’s interest in linguistics may go beyond mine, but the beliefs of the tribe look absolutely fascinating. Hmmm, maybe I’m not out of books yet…
November 7th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
You could do what my bookgroup does every December — we each bring three poems to the group to share by reading aloud. Requires no reading during the weeks prior but also allows for lots of reading if members want to. Members can also write their own poems to share.