Arts

Have Yourself a Literary Christmas

Our contributors pick holiday survival reads.

It's that time of year—you know, the one marked by hour-long airport security lines, displays of ruthless materialism, and small-screen sightings of Bing Crosby in blackface. Mandatory togetherness, rekindled sibling rivalry, sentences that start, "You're such a pretty/nice/smart girl, you could... ." Sometimes no quantity of spiced eggnog is adequate defense. One requires (more or less) literary solace.

Herein, DoubleXers recommend books that get them in the spirit, despite the considerable odds, or, for the resolutely scroogey, provide refuge from it.

If the best way to deal with your own family is to read about one that's undeniably bleaker, try The Power of the Dog, by Thomas Savage. This is not a breezy holiday read, as my sister warned when she recommended it. It's about the twisted relationship between a pair of two brothers who are Montana ranchers in the 1920s, and when it was first published in 1967, it was too subversive and ahead of its time to get any pick-up. Recently revived with an excellent afterword by Annie Proulx, Savage's tale is haunting and relentless in the way her best stories are, and the Western backdrop reminded me of the Cormac McCarthy books I like best.

Or for lighter fare from the West: Tony Hillerman's detective novels about two Navajo policemen, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Try Skinwalkers to get started. They're addictive, especially if you listen to the audio versions read by George Guidall.
—Emily Bazelon

You don’t need me to recommend Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, this year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize and universally praised as “dazzling.” But just in case you are put off by historical fiction, bored by novels of political intrigue, overdosed on the court of Henry VIII, or for some reason suspicious of the Booker prize, I will add my high praise. This novel’s surprise is to turn Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s fixer, into the hero. Mantel does this by making this brutalized, runaway son of a blacksmith into one of the most humane, tolerant, enlightened, even feminist figures in recent fictionalized history. A small sample, from just after he’s run away from his alcoholic, violent father, and made it onto a ship: “He is surprised. Are there people in this world who are not cruel to their children? For the first time, the weight in his chest shifts a little; he thinks, there could be other places, better.”
—Hanna Rosin

I know the answer to this one: If you don't own it already, pick up a copy of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. If you've read it already, read it again. It is sharp, witty, at times hilarious, and also wistful: In effect, it chronicles a series of romantic failures that are simultaneously serious and unserious, comic and tragic. It evokes the world of the semi-impoverished English aristocracy of the 1930s, a world that no longer exists—and that knew its days were numbered even when it did exist. There is no need to participate in the Mitford cult in order to enjoy Nancy's best novel, and Anglophilia is not required, either. All that is necessary is a desire to escape, whether from relatives or the weather. My favorite moment is when the heroine's aristocratic French lover gives her a fur coat after Germany invades France, on the grounds that whatever else happens, the war is certainly going to be very cold. Then he goes off and joins the Resistance, because that's what one does.
—Anne Applebaum

Going home for the holidays can often mean having your self-esteem ground down and regressing to the childhood self you thought you'd left behind. So I recommend escaping by reading a lively tale of an unusual path to self-discovery and confidence, Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Saved My Life, by Brian Rafferty. It's enough to pick you back up after a childish squabble with a sibling leaves you down. As a bonus, it might give you some inspiration for a family outing right around the time when being cooped up is beginning to make everyone crabby.
—Amanda Marcotte

In the wake of Oprah’s abdication from her network throne, I’ll be reading 2008’s The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club. Among other things, it argues that the stigma against middlebrow fiction is basically a rejection of literature women like and even of the way women read.

Then I’ll feel totally justified cracking one of the mysteries I loved in high school, probably Elizabeth Peters’ Trojan Gold. Seasonal festivities in my family include accompanying my father to Macy’s on Christmas Eve and visiting family friends who occasionally say things like, “Actually, many slaves were treated very well.” That’s when I need to remember that I can still move to Germany and become a hot art historian like Vicky Bliss. Instead of marrying that safe assistant professor at the University of Chicago, she spends Christmas in Bavaria, seducing art thieves and taking names.
—Margaret Wheeler Johnson

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