'Tis the season to be reading. I thought I would give another reading
suggestion for Christmas, one of the happy discovery I made last year:
Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson (a fitting author's name for
Yuletide stories if there ever is one). It is twelve short stories and
twelve Christmas recipes (!), one for each of the twelve days of
Christmas. It is a rich and dense book that truly encompass the season's
aspects. Winterson give us mostly ghost stories or stories with an
element of supernatural, not very scary ones, but all very touching.
You also have some very heart warming tales, one about mistreated pupils
in an orphanage run by a tyrannical matron, who are saved by magical
frogs, another about a dog, a retelling of the legend of Mistletoe Bough
and Winterson's own take on the Nativity Story, told by the donkey who
carried the Holy Family to Betlehem ("The Lion, the Unicorn and Me",
which is one of my favourite). The recipes are stories unto themselves,
as each one is associated with a Christmastime memory of the author, not
always a happy one. Christmas Days is one of the best discoveries I
made last year.
Sunday, 22 December 2019
Christmas Days ('Tis the season to be reading)
'Tis the season to be reading. I thought I would give another reading
suggestion for Christmas, one of the happy discovery I made last year:
Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson (a fitting author's name for
Yuletide stories if there ever is one). It is twelve short stories and
twelve Christmas recipes (!), one for each of the twelve days of
Christmas. It is a rich and dense book that truly encompass the season's
aspects. Winterson give us mostly ghost stories or stories with an
element of supernatural, not very scary ones, but all very touching.
You also have some very heart warming tales, one about mistreated pupils
in an orphanage run by a tyrannical matron, who are saved by magical
frogs, another about a dog, a retelling of the legend of Mistletoe Bough
and Winterson's own take on the Nativity Story, told by the donkey who
carried the Holy Family to Betlehem ("The Lion, the Unicorn and Me",
which is one of my favourite). The recipes are stories unto themselves,
as each one is associated with a Christmastime memory of the author, not
always a happy one. Christmas Days is one of the best discoveries I
made last year.
I've only ever read Jeanette Winterson's first book, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" but I enjoyed it as a fairly standard coming out story. I'm not quite sure why it was the literary sensation it was -- timing, I suppose. This book sounds intriguing and I will check it out!
ReplyDelete