Sacramento Public Library discussion

I just finished reading Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. It was my first time reading it and it was so good. I watch some form of the movie every Christmas but this year I wanted to finally read the book and I'm glad I did. It was like visiting with an old friend and there were a few things in the book I'd never seen in any movie.

My Holiday favorite read is hands down Connie Willis's short story "Newsletter" (1997), collected in Miracle and Other Christmas Stories where the narrator despairs of having to write her holiday "status update" in her annual letter to friends and family but gets a boost in news when an alien invasion strikes. Willis is always hilarious and has a good eye for social dynamics in the crowd.

I just finished the title story in Pete Hamill's "The Christmas Kid and other Brooklyn stories" and am looking forward to reading the 35 remaining stories in this collection for the December Reading Challenge. "The Christmas Kid" is about a young boy who is a Holocaust survivor who comes to Brooklyn to live with his uncle after the War and is embraced and protected by the Catholic kids and several caring adults in his uncle's Brooklyn neighborhood.

Finished reading "The Snow Child." I think this is my new favorite Christmas story even though Christmas, as a holiday, doesn't really play a part in the story. It is just a good story to read at Christmas--full of love and miracles. It should be on everyone's Christmas list!

Chelsea wrote: "A great suggestion, Annemarie. Anything with snow sounds good to me at this time of the year!"

And The Snow Child is especially snowy too. I had the pleasure of reading it for a book group during the summer and it cooled me right down. It's set in Alaska and the winter weather is pretty much a character in the book. The author is an Alaska native and her reverence for the winter environment shines through.

Chelsea wrote: "One of my favorite lines is when Sook talks about how happy she is to just be flying the kite on a beautiful Christmas morning: "As for me, I could leave this world with today in my eyes.""

I too was really taken with this section of the story. When I first read the quote you mention, I had to take a moment and return to the paragraph before it with the description of "plunging through the healthy waist-high grass..." and "Satisfied, sun-warmed, we sprawl in the grass and peel Satsumas and watch our kites cavort."

I loved that description. That description made my heart heavy because though the narrator and his friend are not in a snow covered place like Colorado, for me, that description of the world, the sight before the woman's eyes that is so wonderful that she could leave the world having seen it, having experienced it, for me, it evoked sitting on the mountain with skier tracked snow trails plunging down before me and an alpine lake to the distance, with the sun shining down from a blue sky. And it was funny to me that I felt like I was sitting next to the woman, although what I imagined, and where she was, were two different places, maybe just connected by how we feel about our two places that give us peace. Funny that literature can be about one thing, but feel about something else to the reader.

Angie wrote: "Chelsea wrote: "One of my favorite lines is when Sook talks about how happy she is to just be flying the kite on a beautiful Christmas morning: "As for me, I could leave this world with today in my..."

And that is what makes literature great--not the passage of years or the awards accumulated by an author, though all that helps--it is that people, no matter where they live or what they do, can relate to a book or a short story or a poem, and translate it to their own lives. That is true greatness.

Brendle wrote: "Chelsea wrote: "A great suggestion, Annemarie. Anything with snow sounds good to me at this time of the year!"

And The Snow Child is especially snowy too. I had the pleasure of reading it for a bo..."

I loved the magical quality of the book and the timelessness of the piece. I hope that Ms. Ivey will write another book soon.

This was a fun challenge. I started off the month reading A Christmas Carol for the first time which I thoroughly enjoyed as much as the various movie versions. Then, I read three more Christmas books, The Last Train Home by Tony Wilson and A Christmas Gift for Mary Jones by Kimberly Jackson which were okay and The Christmas Dog by Melody Carlson which was a lovely book to finish off my holiday reading.

I finished December's reading challenge a day into the new year but still wanted to share my review:
Pete Hamill's "The Christmas Kid and other Brooklyn stories" moves from poignant to vengeful, heart-warming to hopeless, yet each story is linked in this collection by its Brooklyn setting. Early to mid-20th century Brooklyn emerges as the main character of this book and now feels familiar even though I grew up in a very different time and place. The loyalty of working class immigrants to their neighbors, the fierce stubbornness that causes some characters to cling to their own clearly defined sense of right and wrong, the innocence of childhood and of young love that more often than not leads to disillusionment permeate these stories as ultimately does the lifelong hold Brooklyn has on its residents. While certainly not a book about Christmas, in spite of its title story, these stories are about community and family and friends, all of which are highlighted during every holiday season. The Seamus Heaney quotation from "A Herbal" that prefaces this collection aptly sums up the essence of each story as well as how this reader feels after completing this book: "... I had my existence. I was there. Me in place and the place in me." I'm grateful to have received this book as a Goodread's giveaway and to have been motivated to move it to the top of my "to read" stack by the December challenge.

Way to go Marie! I hope your new book is a wonderful read. Please let us know so we can add it to our list for 2014 MUST reads! Can't wait to see the January challenge!