Christmas Reading: Part Three

Chris Routledge Blog Man, The Reader Online

We'll see how the fancy takes me at the time, but at the moment I'm planning to read The Great Gatsby again, because it is so clean and light and melancholy that it will be an antidote to the heavy puddings and dark days of late December.

Books are probably the most difficult presents to give, unless someone has asked for a title specifically. But that can be a problem too. This year my daughter--a long-term Rev. Awdry fan--has asked for a book called Thomas and the Rainbow. I'm pretty sure she knows doesn't exist and is using to see if Father Christmas really does. She has asked for this book several times, and has specifically mentioned it on visits to see Santa in grottoes around the North West. Naturally we're going to have to write it, because if Santa isn't real, parents of four year-olds have a duty to cover for him."

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Mary Weston Project Worker, Get Into Reading

My reading: At the moment I am working my way through Solzhenizin's Cancer Ward. I bought it a while back because I was looking for political novels to teach for my CE course. I decided against it because we had already done Camus's The Plague, and it was a little too similar, but I promised myself I would read it someday, and am now. It's not quite as depressing as it sounds, but then I also enjoyed The Magic Mountain, another long book about being ill. When I get done I plan to read Marilynne Robinson's Home and Lessings Sirian Experiments.

So far the only book I have bought any one is non-fiction, Abbott Christopher Jamieson's Finding Happiness. I haven't read it myself yet, but I really enjoyed the TV series on The Monastery when it came on, a year or two ago. I was doing the Phoenix House group at the time, and it was fascinating to see the similarities in the processes the people were going through. I bought this book for my brother-in-law who is an overworked parish priest.