When I taught high-school English, I loved planning out the syllabus, book by book. Once chosen, one novel might lead naturally to another; certain titles seemed to go with certain seasons. This second consideration was usually more intuitive than logical, yet it seemed to make a real difference; some books just felt more immersive at particular times of the year. The closing weeks of December, which are both hectic and in some ways ill-defined, have always occupied a unique place in our emotional life—and they seem to call for their own distinctive reading material as well.
Picking the right books for the days ahead can be tricky, because the atmosphere that defines the last dregs of the year can be fraught and contradictory. As decorative lights sparkle while the sun retreats, and rough winds hustle us to holiday parties indoors, most of us feel some mix of merriment and bleakness. Something new and uncertain is on the horizon; nostalgia competes with the promise of the new year’s fresh start. Perhaps what makes a book right for this period is that very both-ness: a liminal space between sorrow and joy, end and beginning, dark and light. The six books below capture just that—and each one is perfect to read by the fire while the days grow imperceptibly longer.
Flight, by Lynn Steger Strong
Family members are frequently the only people who can really fathom certain formative experiences of yours—what it was like to grow up with your specific mother, what your childhood holiday parties smelled like. In part, that’s what can make being misunderstood or judged by them particularly agonizing. In Strong’s novel, siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin gather for the first Christmas since their mother’s death. Each is grieving her loss, struggling because of their complex, unresolved relationships with her. They’re also fighting over how to handle their inheritance: her Florida home. Disagreement about how to manage its sale or ownership—and whether to see it as a financial lifeline or a memorial to the past—simmers under the surface of every conversation about Christmas traditions or family photographs. Through the alternating perspective of each character, readers come to understand the private sorrows that everyone has brought home with them. But the novel suggests, however subtly, that it’s possible to grow beyond the people we were in our youth—to take flight—while still holding on to the people who knew us back then.
Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan
Keegan’s novella follows an Irishman, Bill Furlong, delivering coal throughout a small town during a lean 1980s winter. The story unfolds in the days before Christmas, a time when Bill finds himself particularly moved by the mundane, beautiful things in his life: a neighbor pouring warm milk over her children’s cereal, the modest letters his five daughters send to Santa Claus, the kindness his mother was shown, years earlier, when she became pregnant out of wedlock. While bringing fuel to the local Catholic convent, however, Bill discovers that women and girls are being held there against their will, forced to work in one of the Church’s infamous “Magdalene laundries.” He knows well, in a town defined by the Church, why he might want to stay quiet about the open secret he’s just learned, but it quickly becomes clear that his morals will make him unable to do so. Although the history of Ireland’s treatment of unmarried women and their children is violent and bleak, the novella, like Bill’s life, is characterized by ordinary, small moments of love.
Lost & Found, by Kathryn Schulz
Written after Schulz’s father’s death, this hybrid memoir is divided into three sections: “Lost,” “Found,” and “And.” Drawing on influences as varied as Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem “One Art,” the lexicographic history of the ampersand, Plato’s Symposium, and the geology of the Chesapeake Bay impact crater, Lost & Found is—somehow—compulsively readable. The book is both deeply researched and deeply personal; when Schulz contemplates the experience of falling in love after her bereavement, she wonders how this period of great joy can be so entwined with her pain, and attempts to explain how such seeming opposites not only can, but must, coexist. “Our chronic condition involves experiencing many things at once—some of them intrinsically related, some of them compatible, some of them contradictory, and some of them having nothing to do with one another at all,” Schulz observes. By the time she writes that grief has provided her “what life no longer can: an ongoing, emotionally potent connection to the dead,” she’s already conveyed her main point: that losing and finding are impossible to separate fully. The events of her memoir are common, but the context she provides for them makes the book feel at once familiar and utterly novel.
A Child’s Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas
“Years and years ago, when I was a boy,” Thomas begins, “there were wolves in Wales.” This wild landscape seems so much of a foregone time that, by contrast, his later life and career in mid-century New York feel almost anachronistic. Thomas’s audio recording of A Child’s Christmas in Wales is perhaps better known than the book version, yet its lines, such as “All the Christmases roll down towards the two-tongued sea,” are just as arresting in print as they are in his Welsh accent. His memories of a hazy, bucolic childhood are made more startling and affecting if you know that his adulthood was marked by addiction and illness. Even for those unfamiliar with his later life, the loss of the mysterious, jubilant country he saw through a child’s eyes feels at once inevitable and painful. Unexpected lines such as “Caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons” and the vague darkness of some of its imagery (at one point, Thomas invokes the “jawbones of deacons”) offset what might otherwise be a mawkish reminiscence of childhood Christmas.
North Woods, by Daniel Mason
North Woods is delightful, strange, and unexpected: It’s the story of a plot of Massachusetts land over the course of nearly 300 years, whose inhabitants include 18th-century colonists and a present-day college student. In these woods, which eventually host a house, then an orchard, then an inn, and then a house again, readers meet people tied to pivotal moments in American history—a slave-catcher and supporters of the Underground Railroad, spiritualists both sincere and opportunistic—as well as those whose private sorrows play out the dramas of their eras, such as a woman who dies in childbirth, a renowned painter hiding his love affair with another man, and a family unmoored by a son’s mental illness. Sometimes Mason’s narration nods to moments from earlier chapters, and sometimes the characters directly—supernaturally—interact across centuries. Over the decades and centuries, the characters whose contemporaries see them as unsound or suspect are, the reader understands, the most in tune with the house’s past. By the end of the novel, Mason has conveyed the paradox of history: Its span is so much longer than any individual human life, yet it is inexorably shaped by the way each one of us spends our days.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
Hardy’s bleak, Gothic novel is no cozy Christmas Carol. But its scope and mood are ineffably wintry; it’s the kind of book that demands a crackling hearth to offset the suffering and melodrama. It follows the naive Tess Durbeyfield from her childhood to her death as she suffers a series of heartbreaks and disasters. Set at the end of the 19th century, Tess depicts an England on the verge of a sharp break from its agrarian past, and what its main character endures becomes a metaphor for the much bigger shift Hardy believed he was witnessing: Where her mother’s generation leaned on a “fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore, dialect, and orally transmitted ballads,” Tess and her contemporaries have “trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an infinitely Revised Code,” he writes. “When they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed.” Like much of Hardy’s work, the novel is not subtle in its political arguments, but the writing is at times quite funny too. The book’s long-story-by-the-fire quality, combined with its fairy-tale deployment of castles, unfair punishments, and the thrumming, powerful natural world, evokes the most affecting children’s literature. Those associations, packaged in a gripping novel, make Tess of the D’Urbervilles an apt book for a long, dark night.
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