I love Christmas, especially since having children, but now my kids are a little older (11, 13, 16) I find that I enjoy it more and more as we tend to ‘hunker down’ as a family. We do visits to and from our extended families before and after the 25th of December, but Christmas itself is spent rather quietly together, just the five of us. We have a great time hanging out together (the kids all make a real effort to get along!), watching films, playing games (poker was our favourite last year!), cooking and eating. As the children have got older, the gift-giving (or more accurately, the gift-receiving!) has become less important.
The build-up to Christmas is fun too; I love the mince-pies, the lights, Christmas carols, school performances, and drinks with friends. What I don’t love is the commercialism. I know it’s ‘the golden quarter’ for retail and it’s particularly important for small businesses, but as I’m watching with awe the footage on the BBC’s Blue Planet II and hearing stories in the news about plastics and microfibres being discovered in underwater species, it pains me that Christmas is an orgy of plastic, unrecyclable packaging and ‘novelty’ (useless) gifts. There are some corkers out there! How many of those so-called ‘stocking fillers’ should we more accurately call ‘land-fillers’?
Am I sounding like Ebeneezer Scrooge? Sorry! I’m not here to preach to anyone, I have been and will no doubt continue to be an offender as I get into the last-minute buying panic, but I just want to tell you about my own personal mission this year, which is to give books as much as I possibly can. Now, I am no paragon of virtue – I would be persona non grata if Santa delivered a sackful of books to my kids! – but I’m going to book-give to everyone else on my list (sorry for any spoilers, friends of mine). Books give long-lasting pleasure, they are reusable, re-giftable, and mostly recyclable. What’s not to love? I will also try not to buy from one large online retailer of books – yes, there is usually a discount and it’s an expensive time of year, but bookshops often have lots of offers this time of year too. Independent bookshops need our business; use ’em or lose ’em, our town centres and communities will be much poorer without them. There are two brilliant ones in my locale – the Chorlton Bookshop and the Urmston Bookshop. And if your funds are limited, secondhand books are very acceptable gifts, especially when you chuck in a bar of Fairtrade chocolate! (Oh and books are really easy to wrap.)
So, I’d just like to leave you with this thought – BUY BOOKS THIS CHRISTMAS! It’s also UK Small Business Saturday on 2 December, so you can add to that KEEP IT LOCAL.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be letting you know how I’ve got on and posting my suggestions for books to look out for which will make great gifts.
GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING!
What do you think about giving books for Christmas?
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A book I am particularly fond of is Alison David’s 
I was really torn between Claire Tomalin, Anjelica Huston and Alan Cumming. I left it in the hands of the local library and it was Alan Cumming that became available first! I’m still waiting for Claire Tomalin, and that is probably the one I was keenest to read. I was attracted to Alan Cumming’s book, however, because its premise is not dissimilar to the book I am writing, namely family research and the uncovering of a long-held secret. There the similarity ends, however, as Alan’s book is much more about his relationship with his father.
For November, the challenge is to read a book set in or by a writer from the southern hemisphere – which is, broadly, South America, southern Africa and Australasia. As the nights draw in and it gets increasingly wintry I wanted to be reminded that in other parts of the world it is Summer! So, my choice this month is Isabel Allende’s Portrait in Sepia, a book I picked up in my local Oxfam bookshop and which has been sitting on my ‘to read’ pile for far too long. Allende is such a fine writer and I’ve read a number of her books over the years. It’s great to have an excuse to dive into this one and experience the sensuousness of her writing and the world she evokes, as the last leaves fall from the trees here and nature seems to go into hibernation.
I read A Clockwork Orange on my husband’s recommendation, straight after he’d completed it – it’s one of his favourite films, which we have watched many times, but neither of us had read the book. It’s quite short, but also quite hard-going as it is narrated by the central character, Alex, who speaks in ‘nadsat’ a kind of teenage vocabulary of the future, based loosely on Slav languages. I read it with a glossary (though Burgess intended that it should not be), but after while I found I did not consult it, and it flowed better just to read it and understand the sense, if not every word.
The cover is lovely and there are a handful of illustrations in the book which are truly beautiful and very evocative. The apparent subject matter (animals) and the fact that it has some illustrations might put off some of the target readership (10-11 year olds, I would say), particularly the more advanced readers among them, who might think it is better suited to younger ones. The themes, however, are much more mature than you might think and may in fact be upsetting to more sensitive 9-10 year olds, say. It is perfect, therefore, for older primary school kids who are perhaps more reluctant readers who may find some of those thick volumes a bit daunting. At 276 pages, with a few pictures and nicely spaced typeface, this is a book where pages will be turned quite quickly; in my experience, this is a surprisingly important factor in many children’s enjoyment of a book!
I have been reading a lot of fictionalised biography to help me and one book I read recently I found profoundly moving. Your Father’s Room by French writer Michel Deon is part fiction, part memoir, and looks back to 1920s Paris and Monte Carlo. Edouard, or Teddy, is the only child of a civil servant and his socialite wife. The family moves to Monte Carlo with the father’s job and there is a fascinating insight to life in the south of France at that time, the characters connected to the family and the nature of the relationship between Teddy’s parents. If this is an account in part of the author’s childhood then much of Teddy’s observations will have been imagined by Deon. Perhaps like me he is taking fragments of memory, partial facts and knitting them together to tell a story. It is very engaging even though it is not clear what is truth and what is fiction. How much of any of our family history is a story anyway, ‘facts’ that have been embellished (or concealed) over the years?
It’s a tough one to review without giving too much away, and the comments on the jacket don’t say very much about the story either, only that it is “exquisite”, “compelling” and “forcefully moving”. The central character is Linda (also Madeline or Mattie to her parents), who is an only child living with her parents in small town Minnesota. To say they live in a rural environment is an under-statement; they live in a cabin in the woods, which they seem to have built themselves, with their dogs. It seems they were formerly part of a small commune, but the other residents have gradually moved away as the cooperative spirit broke down. Linda’s parents are rather remote and she is allowed to roam the area freely, to canoe on the lake as and when she pleases, and to walk many miles in all weathers.
There are a couple of titles that have been on my reading list for a while. The first is Scottish actor and comedian Alan Cumming’s Not My Father’s Son, which was published in 2014. It is linked to his appearance in BBC TV show Who Do You Think You Are? in 2010 in which the result of his research caused him to reflect on his family, his upbringing and, in particular, his relationship with an abusive father. It has received glowing reviews and has also won prizes. The theme of secrets and family research is close to the book I am writing myself so it could be helpful. Or it may just make me feel like givng up now!!!
Finally, I saw in the bookshop recently that Claire Tomalin has written A Life of My Own, where, for a change, she is writing about herself. I admire Claire Tomalin hugely; she has written some of the finest biographies produced in recent years, covering subjects such as Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys and Mary Wollstonecraft. She has led the most astonishing life: an unhappy childhood, four children, the death of her husband, the loss of a child, and the eternal struggle between motherhood and work. I think I would find this book truly inspiring.
Julia's books 