Christmas Books
What's your favourite reads or rereads over Christmas? I love anthologies of spooky stories and I've just comes across two collections of ghostly festive stories for kids, edited by Dennis Pepper. These are brilliantly chosen and put together, I think - with everything ranging from that Arthur C Clarke story I mentioned the other day, to Susan Price, Shirley Jackson and Robert Fisk. It's a lovely eclectic mix. There's a very funny story by Patrice Chaplin about the give and take and give again of recycling presents.
My other favourite set of anthologies are the Scholastic ones from the Nineties: Haunting / Mysterious / Chilling Christmas tales, etc. They're like the UK branch of Goosebumps, but with a bit more oomph and substance and genuinely spooky stuff.
In terms of rereads over Christmas... well, I've already written here about my favourites - The Dark is Rising, Carrie's War, the Box of Delights. I might be giving these ones a rest this year.
My utterly guilty pleasure is in reading Star Trek original novels. I've only mentioned this to a few people before. I guess it's something to be ashamed of? I don't even enjoy watching the TV show anymore. But there's something about those novels. I mean the Pocketbook ones of the early 80s. And my favourite of all time is Melinda Snodgrass's 'Tears of the Singers.' It's a ludicrously sentimental thing about Uhura falling in love with a kind of interstellar Rick Wakeman, and the two of them travelling to a world of alien seals, who are endangered by hunters... whose song upholds the very fabric of time and space... and whose crystal tears fall when they are clubbed to death... By all rights I should hate it. But I ADORE this book. I have read it most Christmas weeks of recent years. I get gooseflesh just thinking about Uhura holding up her dying Rick Wakeman as he labours over his futuristic organ... and the seals are singing all around him... and the klingons and the Enterprise have vanished seemingly forever inside a great rip in reality... It's MARVELLOUS stuff. I think I love the Star Trek books because the writers at that stage never forgot that it was meant to be melodrama and space opera... and I think those producing the TV show actually did forget that.
Anyway! What do you you read over Christmas? Don't tell me it's something classy and smart. What are you reading when you crack the sweet sherry open? I need recommendations!
2 Comments:
I love those 90s Scholastic books! When I was a child my best friend had the whole series, and I remember being terrified by the story about a game where you snatch burning raisins out of a fiery Christmas pudding.
Thanks for the reminder, they'll be getting a re-read this year!
Have you read John Gordon? Spooky novels for kids, a bit Alan Garnerish. The Giant Under the Snow is set in December in East Anglia, and it’s full of chases through the mist, ancient kings returning for lost belt buckles, creepy figures with spidery fingers, and a wonderful character called Elizabeth Goodenough who, so far in my rereading, swooshes round her mysterious cottage in a fur coat smoking exotic cigarettes and seeing off nasties with an invisible whip! She’s a bit like the Wizard in the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, played by Julie Christie.
I won’t be rereading Children of Green Knowe this year, but going to see the 1980s BBC version at the BFI in a couple of weeks. I normally like a bit of Dickens, but I think I’m going with Leon Garfield this year, and possibly the Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Nothing says Christmas like a wolf running alongside a train…
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